Teenage Budget: The First Step to a More Financially Sound Life

Having a budget ensures their allowance isn’t wasted on unnecessary items. The positive aspects of a teenage budget include financial control, increased responsibility, goal achievement, and reduced financial stress. The negative aspects include being too rigid, limiting spontaneity, and not always adapting to our circumstances.

With a budget, we never know when our money will be needed. Sometimes, there are sudden needs, and we don’t know what will happen in the future, such as a sibling’s celebration, an accident, or something else. This budget reminds me of the current protests, as students protest against the drastic increase in allowances and budgets. It’s understandable, but the higher-ups haven’t provided a clear explanation for the increase, so it’s understandable that students are rebelling.

Let’s try to manage our money wisely in this modern world. We differentiate between needs and wants. We shouldn’t be too eager to fulfill our desires when our needs haven’t been met. We should always think more clearly about the future, evaluating every expense, especially when our expenses exceed our income. We must first have a target and purpose for how we’re setting up this budget, for example, to help meet household needs, pay off debts, buy items we want, or other things.

We record these expenses in a book or use online applications like Notes, a money manager, etc. Use envelope budgeting or our income, dividing it into several categories of needs or distributing it into several envelopes. If there is waste, we have to think ahead, why am I wasting money this month? Well, we can use it as an evaluation, no matter how little money we spend, we try to record it because little by little, it will add up, right? If there is money left over from yesterday’s money, we can use it to reward ourselves or to entertain ourselves, we can also put it in savings for emergencies that will come at any time.

So, think about the era of Gen Z and Millennials like now, they prioritize entertainment and spend money on extravagance, they prioritize prestige while people at home even to cook rice, they borrow rice from the stall. Other friends, don’t imitate people who waste money, we can do entertainment but don’t let us go into debt, especially if the debt is not repaid, just enough as long as our clothing, food, and shelter are met first, right?

We also need to be able to differentiate between realization and budget planning, friends. Realization is something that is successful or exists in reality, not just like a lizard’s talk [fake]. So we also need to have concrete evidence that all of this that we have planned to achieve targets can be realized. Hopefully, as teenagers in this modern and digital era, we can still organize everything about budget funds. Students, housewives, and all women, we try to be able to organize it.

There is no need to follow other people’s styles, we must have our own stance. Maybe someone thinks we are stingy when we try to organize all the budget funds that we previously wasted without thinking about financial life or when starting a family in the future. Furthermore, to make it easier for us to differentiate, we must have a wish list, for example, we have needs such as food, housing, transportation, further education, then there are also wants such as entertainment, shopping for luxury goods, traveling. Let’s implement the budget planning from now on rather than regretting it in the future, the more modern it is, the more expensive everything is, not only luxury goods, the prices of vegetables in the market are also increasing.

By: Silvia Leanika Alsisil

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