1st response 

One concept I took away from chapters 3 and 4 is the Budget 50/20/30. 50% take home pay to fixed /variable monthly expenses. 20% to savings/401k/emergency fund/travel. 30% of take home to fun and miscellaneous.

I budget the first of the year every year. I first put in my fixed bills, estimate my variables such as groceries and gas. I have also tried to practice the ten percent of your net pay to savings, but I am not always successful. What I do find that I am successful at is planning a big purchase or a vacation. I review the amount I will need by a certain time to secure airline tickets, lodging, and car rentals. I then will review the amounts I will need to have ready by time of the trip such as remaining amounts due, fun excursions, spending money, and meals. This will tell me the amount of money I need to take out each month by the amount of months/dollar amounts.

I find a program I use through my bank will analyze my monthly statement. I can review the variances to tell me whether I need to cut back a little in certain areas or I have extra to go toward savings or maybe put toward a bill.

2nd 

There are a number of concepts from Chapters 3 and 4 that are important to my personal finances. One of the concepts that I found most important was creating a budget. Creating a budget allows me to identify what my needs are and helps me control my spending and saving accordingly. I wanted to know more about this because it forced me to create a budget of my own. To be honest I have never created a budget so this was a very eye opening experience and task for me.

Creating a budget was actually a huge learning experience for me. Believe it or not I never created a budget before and saying that sounds extremely irresponsible and crazy to me. I do not how I’ve functioned as an adult without one. I have hopes that after creating a budget for myself this week I will be able to start implementing it.

After creating my budget, I started to take a dive into identifying my budget variances. Our textbook advised us on creating an excel sheet. I decided to start off doing it manually alongside my budget plan sheet. The benefit to tracking budget variances is to help stay me stay on budget and eliminate careless spending.