Coinquest

  Photo by  Andre Taissin  on  Unsplash W hen making a big purchase (think an appliance or expensive tech gadget), I was often faced by questions like “How much can you afford to pay?”, “What is your budget?”,… My answer was usually a guesstimate based on my research into typical prices of the commodity I’m buying. They weren’t really about whether I could afford the thing, but about how much I thought was reasonable to pay for it. Deciding whether I could afford something, it turns out, required me to have a clear picture of my finances and a budget. It took me a depressingly long time to figure this out. It also took a lot of effort to correctly capture my financial picture once I did. I am, however, in a much better place for it. Through online reading and conversations with my friends I came across  zero-based budgeting  and the  You Need a Budget (YNAB)  system. In a nutshell, the idea is to assign every dollar of your income a job: paying re...