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If you’ve ever tried budgeting for the long run only to find that your best-laid plans always seem to get ruined by short-term emergencies, then you’re not alone.

Unexpected things pop up that can surprise even the most dedicated budgeters.

Fortunately, there are some ways you can balance your longer-term goals – like saving for retirement or setting aside money for a new home – with practical, day-to-day obligations, like keeping up with your credit card payments and utility bills.Here are a few ideas to help you stay on top of your present financial responsibilities, without sacrificing your future economic security:

Plug Your Spending Leaks

Many times, we thwart our noblest intentions to save money by allowing “spending leaks” to dampen our finances. I found out the hard way recently how a spending leak – a literal one – cost my family hundreds of dollars in 2010. It all started with a leaky tub faucet in the hallway bathroom.

As it turns out, after my teenage daughter, my 11-year old son or my five-year-old daughter would take their showers or baths, one of them would invariably not turn the spigot completely off. And even when they did, little beads of water continued to drip – 24 hours a day.

After several months of high water bills – between $125 and $150 a month – my husband, Earl, told everyone to be more careful about water use around the house. He also went ahead and fixed that leaky tub.

I can’t tell you if the kids are truly being more conscientious about conserving water. But I do know that our December 2010 water bill dropped back to more normal levels, around $35 monthly, saving us about $100 a month. And the utility bills have consistently been lower since then, too.

So think about your own life: Are there areas where you’re spending money and literally washing cash down the drain? If so, it’s time to plug your own leaks. For instance, that car of yours that keeps giving you headaches? Instead of throwing good money after bad with local mechanics or getting by with a little elbow grease and know-how from your cousin who’s handy with a wrench, maybe it’s time to head to the dealer to get the problem fixed properly, once and for all.

If you spend the money now getting something done right, you won’t get a nasty surprise with that ailing car a month or two from now, which can blow your budget.

Try the Envelope System

Remember when you were a kid and you got money for your birthday, a holiday or some special occasion? If you got to spend that money as you pleased, chances are, that was a real treat. But you might also remember a bit of sadness, once you realized the money was all gone.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, what you experienced was actually preparing you for the real world: None of us has an infinite amount of cash, so we’ve got to use what we have wisely.

One way to better manage your spending – and avoid blowing money – is to use the envelope system. Simply put, it’s a way for you to categorize and control your spending by devoting a specific amount to various areas. For example, you might have these monthly categories:

• $400 – Food (grocery store and eating out)
• $100 – Personal care/cosmetics
• $100 – Clothing
• $50 – Gifts/miscellaneous

Doing it this way, you budget ahead of time how much cash you can spend on each of these areas during the month. Then you put that amount of money into an envelope.

The key is: Once the money in the envelope is gone, it’s gone. You can’t go dipping into other envelopes, nor should you over-extend yourself by using credit cards just because you want to continue spending.

One benefit of the envelope system is that it serves as a constant reminder that money does eventually run own if it’s not saved, just as it did when you were a kid.

If you do yourself a favor and set up an envelope for “savings” – and treat that envelope as if you were paying for any other expense – I can promise you, you’ll reap the rewards of paying yourself first.

And not only will your present-day bills get paid, but you’ll gradually start building your savings for the future, too. Lynnette’s article originally appeared on DailyFinance.

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Saving money for the future doesn’t have to be so serious, and it’s not always done for such high-minded goals like retirement or paying for a child’s college education.

When my husband, Earl, and I got married, it was the second time around for us. So when we joined households, we had a hodge-podge of furniture that clashed and which, frankly, looked like something out of a badly furnished dorm room. There was steel mixed with wood. His old yellow leather sofa and my glass tables. It was an architectural mess.

I don’t remember just what caused our awakening of how frightfully uncoordinated our furnishings were. But I do recall the two of us, almost simultaneouly, having an epiphany that something (OK, everything) needed to change. The house needed to look like grown-ups — adults who had at least two cents worth of style and taste — lived there.

But we didn’t rush out to the nearest store and buy everything at once, or engage in impulse shopping. Instead, we shopped for just the right items, planned our purchases in order to continue saving money, and made fun out of the process.It took us nearly a year to get the kitchen the way we wanted it, to find a dining room set that we both liked, and to coordinate the foyer and living room furniture, along with an interior paint job for the house, too.

All the while, we kept in our heads a vision of what we wanted our home to be like. And for the most part, we’ve created that vision. We now call our humble little house “the farm.”

No, we’re not milking cows or tending sheep (we don’t have any). But with three kids, we do have a busy, active household, and there’s always something to be done in our home.

And just like a farm has pigs, so do we. Ours are two piggy banks – one in the shape of a recliner, the other a red, heart-shaped bank that says “His” and “Hers” – to remind us of our shared future goals.

If you do like we did, you’ll find that it’s OK to keep it light. Having a special savings fund to help you save money for a goal is beneficial, to be sure. But so too is having any visual or symbolic reminder – especially a fun one – about why you’re saving or sacrificing.

So consider doing these two things:

1. Set up a designated “fund” that you only tap for a specific goal. It could be money set aside for a vacation, for a down payment on a new car, or for anything else that matters to you. Read the rest of Lynnette’s article on Daily Finance

Too many people have millionaire dreams but no millionaire plans. Well, you can’t become a millionaire just by dreaming, wanting or wishing for wealth. You have to lay out a plan, and you have to execute in order to fulfill the goals within that plan. As you’re developing the framework for your millionaire’s budget, now is a good time to think about planning for the future and reaching some of your bigger goals. We all have goals, whether or not we realize it.

So many times we get caught up in the tasks and activities required just to make it day-to-day that we forget about setting substantive goals for the future. But it’s absolutely crucial to establish and write out your short, medium and long-range goals. Some of you may not have thought about your own goals much lately. Perhaps your life has been consumed by your children’s world; their needs and wants always come first, and you constantly put your desires on the back burner. Well, it’s a mistake to do that. Financially speaking, you can get yourself so wrapped up in another person – whether that individual is your child, partner or parent – that you neglect yourself and fail to engage in smart, practical financial planning for yourself. You don’t want to look up 20 years from now and think: “I should’ve managed my money better when I was younger.”

To start handling your finances better today, and to make a giant leap toward becoming a millionaire, one of the most important things you can do is to write out your personal goals. This one act alone will help you build a foundation for a lifetime of wealth. If you are married, or in a committed relationship, I suggest you do this exercise with your partner. Write your goals first, and then share your goals with the other person. At the end of the day, we are all individuals with out own unique dreams and ambitions. Yet, for those of use involved with significant others, it’s crucial that you make a habit of setting – and reaching – your goals together.

I want you to think of your goals in the context of how long it will be before these goals can be realized. Short-term goals should be something that you can accomplish in a relatively brief period of time, say in one to two years, at most. Medium-term goals can be classified as those that require two to 10 years to accomplish. Long-range goals are those that require 10 years or more to fulfill. To jumpstart your thinking, I’ve included a laundry list of goals below. Some of these may be relevant to you; others may hold no significance for you. The idea, however, is to give yourself permission to focus on the things you want to accomplish in the future, goals you may never have acknowledged to yourself, let alone written down or verbalized to someone else.

Among the goals you might pursue are:

• ·Eliminating credit card debt
• ·Buying a new home
• ·Saving for a college education
• ·Investing for retirement
• · Starting a business
• ·Establishing a cash cushion
• · Paying for a wedding
• ·Saving for a new baby
• ·Purchasing a vacation home
• ·Traveling around the world
• ·Buying a boat
• ·Paying off student loans
• ·Making a large contribution to church, synagogue, etc.
• ·Buying a new car or a second

Excerpt from The Money Coach’s Guide To Your First Million

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Q: I have $1000 I would like to invest. What type of investment you think I can do that will yield the highest (return). I am saving to buy a house and hope to do so by next year.

A: Before you invest $1,000, I’d suggest taking care of five financial basic:

1) Paying off credit card debt
2) Have a “rainy day” fund of up to $1,500 to deal with any unplanned, short-term emergencies
3) Creating a will
4) Having life insurance
5) Getting disability coverage

If you’re covered on all those areas, then you can think about investing. The first two questions you must ask yourself are:

1) How long am I planning to invest this money?
2) How much risk can I tolerate?

Since you said you want to buy a house in a year or so, it’s really not appropriate to tie that money up into longer-term savings vehicles, like CDs that mature in longer than 1 year.

At the same time, you don’t want to put the money into anything too aggressive, like a stock fund, or individual stocks, if it’s money you really need to use for the down payment on your home or for closing costs.

You have to realize that risk and reward go hand in hand. The riskier investments may pay higher yields (i.e. better returns, or higher interest rates) on your money, but they also pose the biggest threat to you. Simply put, the riskier an investment, the less likely you will see all of your money returned to you. Put another way: the riskier an investment, the greater the chance you could lose some or all of your cash.

Unless you’re willing to cope with the risk of losing your house-savings, I wouldn’t really put that $1,000 in the stock market. I’d put it in a high yield savings account to make sure it was there when I needed it a year from now.

For anyone with a longer time frame, say 3 years or more, then I’d suggest taking that $1,000 and putting it into an index mutual fund. Find a good-performing fund that tracks a major index, like the S&P 500, and give your $1,000 investment time to grow. All the major mutual fund companies offer low-cost index mutual funds.

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