Pay Yourself first.
A lot of people already do this through some type of retirement. I keep the retirement and do this anyways. What you want to do is allocate an automatic 10% of your take home income to your personal long-term investment fund. You can hold it in cash, in the bank, or allocate it to a Roth IRA account. My current personal investment strategy is ⅓ gold, ⅓ silver, and ⅓ bitcoin. If one asset moves significantly higher or lower, I simply rebalance so all are at least above the 30% level.
No Excuses, not matter how much or how little… at least 10% of your income must be allocated to saving and Investments (S&I). The average household income in the USA is about $52,000 per year. Say after taxes and other pre-check expenses your take home is 80%, the average take home would be 41,600 a year or about $3467 per month. This is also assuming most likely that at least 2 people are working “household income” but let's keep the numbers simple and calculate for a rounded up $3500 a month.
$3500 at S&I of 10% budgets for $350 a month. Just saving this amount will add about $4200 a year to your assets and 42,000 in 10 years. Being that the average small business startup cost is about $30,000, you would be able to finance a venture in about 7 years. Meanwhile, your money could be invested. The ideas are endless once you have your money saved and you will have plenty of time to decide how you wish to move forward.
Pay Your Creditors Second.
I maximize my creditor leverage to where the service of that leverage would cost no more than 10% of income. So revolving credit cards, if your payments are lower than your 10% allocation, in this cast $350 then over pay, the additional amount will go toward principal and pay off your cards faster.
Pay Yourself Again! … A spending allowance!
Now take another 10% and spend it as you wish!
The Rest
The rest of the 70% should cover your housing, food, and utilities. If you are frugal and have plenty leftover… the leftover amount “profit” should be split equally between the above three categories.
Please up-vote and comment :)