Overview

I'm going to leave the "Earning" portion of the equation up to you. But the spending portion encompasses a lot.

Since the goal of this documentation is to show you how to grow your money over time your spending should sort of break down into categories like these:

• Bare essentials (e.g. food, housing)
• Really good to have (e.g. clothes, water, power, transportation)
• Savings
• Nice to have (e.g. vacations, hobbies)

I could detail all of that out, but why bother when someone else did it better?

Flowchart

(a.k.a. The Prime Directive )

Created by /u/atlasvoid over on /r/personalfinance, I think it does an amazing job of laying everything out for you. No need for me to reinvent the wheel.