It was a very exciting time of life, we just returned from our honeymoon and we were ready to start our life together. At the time we were living in a 2 bedroom apartment in Long Island and because we wanted to start a family we were looking forward to buying a house.

Only problem was we didn’t have any money saved, so we sat down and made a game plan of how we were going to come up with enough money for a down payment. We were both making OK money at the time but we had no idea where all of the money was going.

Here’s What We Did

Everyday for about 7-10 days we wrote down on log every penny we spent, didn’t matter if it was $0.50 we wrote it down and were able to track where all of our future down payment was going. We were sick to our stomachs to find out that we were easily spending a couple hundred dollars between us every week, on nonsense: pack of gum here, buy lunch there, coffee here. Complete and total waste of money, now we had to decide how bad we wanted to buy a house and how soon we could save for it.

The next day we went to the grocery store (coupons in hand) and to the wholesale club to buy in bulk. We started brown bagging it for lunch, spent money during the week only on the necessities as opposed to luxuries and made a conscious effort to ask ourselves before making any purchase do we want this product or do we want to buy a house. Simple question but powerful because it brings up your goal (house) to the fore front of your mind so you can actually envisions buying your house.

Some Tips to Help Make Your

Budgeting Goal More Powerful

Using my first house as an example for budgeting, we would drive around on weekends looking at the types of house, location and obviously the price. We then determined what we would need for the down payment, broke it down into monthly amounts that we would need to save and made it our goal every month to deposit that amount in a separate account.

What will keep you fired up and excited to stick to your goal, is knowing specifically everything you can about what you want your house to be like, to the point where you feel like you already own it. The more specific and visual you can make this image of your house, the more disciplined you will be in making that monthly deposit to your house account.

I suggest cutting out some pictures from the newspaper of the houses you have your eye on, remember you’re not looking to buy now, just looking to stay motivated so don’t get stressed out if the house that you have a picture of sells.

The whole key is to be committed to buying your house and making it a joint effort from the family, if you have kids let them in on it, they can deposit a couple dollars a month from their allowance that in itself is powerful, teaching your children how to save for an important goal.

In my ebook Budgeting for Life, I have the specific worksheet mentioned in this article and questions to help you budget your money to help you reach some of your financial goals.