Building a personal budgeting system that reduces the complexity of the process to paying attention to 1 number and about 5 minutes per week to be sure you're on budget all the time.
I came up with a solution to this problem about 5 years ago and have been testing iterations with friends and family. In process of building an app to manage it for me.
It's awesome that you have a budget, and a process for doing it. Would you find it useful to know whether or not you can afford something you're about to buy, be it a taco, a couch or a car? Your budget works well in as a reflection process, my budget gives you the constant knowledge of how you're doing right now and how you'll probably be doing in the future.
I use a spreadsheet with rows bulk spending categories and columns months, plus a few summary columns. More than 15 years ago it was just a table on graph paper. I know within a few dollars how much I have earned spent in the past 12 months. The 'budget' is awareness of such spending and trying to keep not much more than the previous year. Stuff happens like a dead car, hospital stay, job change etc. so its not always firm.
Motivation comes from three things, provided you're in a creative role and money's not an issue: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. You need to be able to decide how to get the job done, you need to be able to get better and better at your job, and you need to understand why your job matters in the scope of something larger than yourself. Figure out which is missing, decide if you can find it, and if not, go somewhere that can give it to you.
Do everything with no framework. Vanilla JS, basic Rails, Basic PHP. Whatever you know the best, use it and build it. Don't get distracted by features. Until you have a working system, you don't need to refactor. Start with one tiny bit and move on from there.
Choose FI. Being exposed to the concept of financial independence, retiring early and providing a framework and mindset for achieving them has completely transformed my life from aimless working for money to working for a goal.
Decide if you want to be a designer.
If you don't, then hire one and make sure you pay them as well as you'd want to be paid.
If you do, then do your equivalent of going to school for it.
After 4 years of excellent growth my partner and I had enough income to support one person full-time. Both of us were programmers, the company was a side gig for us. When his dad was laid off from his job, we hired him to handle the day-to-day of the company, which was mostly turn-key at that point.
He did a bad job, drove the company into the ground, and we couldn't fire him without major personal issues, so we let the company die. I divested myself before things got really bad, but it was so sad to watch all that work and potential go up in flames.
We should have fired him anyway, but that's how you learn.
If it was mostly turn key, how’d he do such a bad job? I’m mostly at that point with my business and am aiming to “fool-proof” operations so looking for things I may be overlooking.
I guess you can apply fool-retardant, but can’t really fool-proof processes - that’s much the business value of an org once the basics are in place. “You had ONE job” is a meme for a reason :-)
