The easiest and most painless way to control your expenses

Sometimes it even seems that planning a budget for a month is a punishment for spending that at some point gave us pleasure, but in fact does not correspond to our income. But there is another way to control your finances, which is less painful and tedious. It was developed by financial consultant Marty Kurtz. He noticed that people usually divide money into three categories: old commitments, daily costs, and future needs. Knowing how to distribute income among these categories can make your life easier.

Divide the money that will go to pay bills and the money that you can spend on yourself by placing it on different cards. It will help you live within your means.

Fixed costs

First, make sure that these expenses are no more than half of your annual income. Based on this amount, you can decide which apartment or car to buy, which services are especially important for you. It determines how much money you have left for the other two categories.

Flexible costs

These are daily expenses: food, gasoline, entertainment, personal items. Approximately 30% of your income should go to this category. Try calculating how much you spend in a year and dividing that number by 52 (the number of weeks in a year). This will give you the amount you need for the week.

Future expenses

This category should account for approximately 20% of income. It can include retirement savings, money set aside for travel, medical expenses or repairs. For each subcategory, you can open a separate account and, as you accumulate money on them, decide what exactly to spend the funds on. With such accounts for the future, you do not have to borrow or use credit cards.

Unlike traditional monthly budgeting, this system hardly needs to be revised. It is enough to make changes to it when your salary changes or when you are thinking about some big purchase. In everyday life, you just need to determine which category the purchase belongs to and decide whether to spend money on it or not.

Vocal is the easiest way to send voice messages in Gmail

When you are too lazy to write a large letter, you can dictate it. The function of sending voice messages has already appeared in almost all social networks and instant messengers, but it still does not exist in Gmail. Third-party developers have decided to fill this gap with a simple and very easy-to-use extension for Chrome called Vocal.