Personal finance budgets are a must for everybody – and more so for a soldier who may not be there at home to take some day to day decisions. Budgeting can help in a number of ways:

• A personal budget is THE way to make sure you do not spend more than you make. For a soldier who is spending time at the border, it is almost impossible to know how the family is spending its money. Spending more than you make is the obviously the ONLY reason for the large amount of debt many families and individuals carry. An American study found that most Americans spend 120% of their income, regardless of salary level. Do you need an IQ of 220 to realize why such families get into debt? Not rocket science, right? If you earn Rs. 100 and spend Rs. 120, you will get into debt. Sometimes it is not so obvious – the spending may be sporadic – health, or vacations, weddings..could be a lumpsum which you cannot afford. Lifestyle creep and debt creep are similar. Especially credit card debt, sort of creeps up on you. Suddenly you discover you owe more than you realized and you really can’t put a finger on a single big expense! Using a budget is one way to help prevent this problem and will help you spend sensibly after providing for your goals.

• Personal budgeting is a vital tool for you to plan your spending. It tells you how to plan your saving and investing and encourages you to spend after what is used for saving and investing. This means you will “pay yourself first” – the best first step to achieve all your financial goals – including the biggest – the RETIREMENT GOAL.                          http://www.subramoney.com/2016/09/how-to-make-pay-yourself-first-work/

• With a budget, you can identify bad spending habits, poor investment choices – which means you need to learn how to invest, poor money decisions or just not planning or breaking the financial plan. At the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie! When you add up everything and the result is in negative territory, you know that you are WRONG and you need corrective action. That is called Budgetary Control – you take immediate action to make sure that such mistakes do not keep occurring again and again. Corrective action is what you are taught in the military too, right?
• It helps you keep your spending under control. You know how much you are earning. You write down all that you are spending, you know what you are investing – as long as you are within your limits, you are fine. Treat your credit card as a convenience tool, not as a source of income. Treat it like a debit card and ASSUME THAT you can pay off the full balance every month in full, WITHOUT FAIL.  By budgeting every month, you can keep yourself from using a credit card when you really cannot actually afford the things that you are (unnecessarily) buying. If you don’t have the money to pay for your purchase, do not buy. 
• Well a budget can actually give you more freedom by drawing the lines much more in advance. When you go into a mall to buy, you know how much you can spend on what. This relaxes you – otherwise you tend to terribly over spend or under spend. Either way you are tense till you come home and check what you have done. Not worth the tensions that you go through for the same!! Here you make your purchases relaxed and you know for a fact you have the money for it!
• Having a budget will make you more aware of your money. You will have a hang on how much you earn, what are your broad areas of spending, etc – this is first step to creating a secure financial future. You cannot ever become wealthy by not being aware of your money (except those few lucky ones who inherit or get a lottery). Once you have developed your financial plan a.k.a. budget, you will be able to analyze every potential purchase to determine whether the purchase supports your goals of debt-free living and financial freedom. It will also tell you when will you reach it, and if at all !! If you do not like what you see, do not break the mirror – you need to act differently!
• For those deployed service members, setting up a budget system MUCH before you leave will give you peace of mind and allow you to focus on your mission. Just as you are ‘rationing’ your food water and energy resources sitting in some part of Kargil or some part of North East, at least  knowing that your family back home has enough money to pay all the bills, while making investments is a lot of comfort, is it not? That gives you one less thing to worry about.

The bottom line is that personal budgeting, is crucial if you want to ensure that you are keeping more and more of what you make. In turn, the more you keep (as saving), the more wealth you can build by converting the savings into investments.

Go to take Command of the army knowing that your spouse has taken COMMAND of your finances!!