{"id":4880,"date":"2009-07-08T05:00:16","date_gmt":"2009-07-08T12:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getrichslowly.org\/blog\/?p=4880"},"modified":"2019-05-29T02:12:42","modified_gmt":"2019-05-29T09:12:42","slug":"learning-to-budget-with-the-jars-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/learning-to-budget-with-the-jars-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to budget with a money jar system"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"money<\/p>\n

This article was written by Steve Martile<\/strong>, a life coach and the author of the personal-growth blog Freedom Education<\/strong><\/a>. Here he describes a money jar system for budgeting that actually reminds me of Elizabeth Warren’s balanced money formula<\/a>, but with a little more detail.<\/em><\/p>\n

Managing money doesn’t restrict freedom \u2014 it creates freedom.<\/p>\n

While that’s probably not the first time you’ve heard this, you’ve got to start managing your money if you want to create financial abundance. I started doing so in 2006 after reading T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind<\/a><\/em> [J.D.’s review<\/em><\/a>].<\/p>\n

Before then, my wife and I were pretty random with our spending habits. We ran a pretty high tab every month and had nothing to show for it. At the time, I was driving a brand new Nissan 350Z, which cost me an $800 payment each month. That didn’t include insurance or gas, that was just the payment on the car.<\/p>\n

<\/span>JARS: The Money Jar System<\/span><\/h2>\n

Then we started using the JARS money management system discussed in Secrets of the Millionaire Mind<\/em>. And what are the JARS? The JARS are just that: plastic jars. Here’s a photo of my jars from my home office:<\/p>\n

The jars themselves aren’t actually that important.<\/strong> What’s more important is the money management system behind them. We actually bought the JARS as a visual reminder of where to put our money when we manage it. But we manage it from a set of bank accounts.<\/div>\n

<\/span>Managing your Money Reaps Rewards<\/span><\/h2>\n

Once we started to manage our money, I sold the 350Z. After our first year, without any significant change in our income and all expenses being treated equal, our net worth increased by a surprising 45%. When we learned how to apply this system we realized it was very simple and it didn’t require a lot of our time.<\/p>\n

Here are the results we produced after using the JARS for 12 months:<\/p>\n