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THREE STEPS
to Family Financial
SUCCESS
H
AVE YOU
ever wondered why
so many capable and intelli–
gent farnilies that have a good
sense of personal responsibility hang
on the edge of financia! disaster?
Monetary problems, it seems, plague
just about every other family you
know. Financia! experts tell us that
arguments and worries over making
eods meet are often the cause of di–
vocee and parent-child troubles.
ls yours one of those bewildered
families that is missing the "good
life" despite an adequate income? Do
you wonder how you can get out of
debt? Are monetary problems the big
worry in your life? They used to be
forme.
But now l've discovered the three
major causes of most family financia!
difficulties. Understand them, correct
them, and your money troubles can
be a thing of the past.
Problem One - No Real
Budget
Family Jinancial consultants do not
say that most families get into Jinancial
difliculty because of too little income.
PLAIN TRUTH
June
1972
by
John E. Portune
They say
poor
ma11agemmt
of income
is the problem.
Armed with this information, 1 in–
terviewed people on the street about
their personal budgets. 1 was in for
a surprise.
I had expected a good proportion
to say they didn't budget their in–
comes. But without exception, every–
one 1 talked to said that he did indeed
budget.
But what 1 soon learned b}' deeper
questioning was that the average man
or woman does not even know what
budgeting is.
As an illustration, one lady, after
liberally praising the value of her
own budget, told me how she did
it. "1 keep it in my head. l'd probably
do better if 1 wrote it clown and
planned better."
Most people, while they may have
convinced themselves that they bud–
get, only go through a monthly
wrestling match with their bills. They
may spend a lot of time and effort
at it, but they are not budgeting.
Proper budgeting, as I have learned
after many years of monthly bill
juggling, is a systematic, well–
documented process that eliminates
the monthly nightmare of trying to
figure out where you're going
to
get
enough money to pay all your bills.
Few people know how successfully it
works.
An Ancient Principie
I actually stumbled onto the real
technique of budgeting in, of all
places, the Bible. 1 knew that many
famous men had frequently sought
for practical guidance in its pages,
but 1 never realized how clearly the
concept of how to handle one's regular
income is described in an ancient
Hebrew custom.
According to lsrael's statutory laws,
the people were düected to set aside,
apart from their regular offerings to
God, a fixed percentage of their regu–
lar income for personal use at annual
religious occasions. However, they
were not
to
take this amount solely
from whatever was on hand when it
was needed. They were to set aside a
fixed percentage of their income as
it carne in. This method (of setting
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