100 Motivational Quotes About Budgeting (2023)

1. Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” – Joe Biden

2. “Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.” – John C. Maxwell

3. “Many times a company’s superpower is not the branding image, advertising budget or selling skills, but it is empathy.”

4. “Management is a set of processes that can keep a complicated system of people and technology running smoothly. The most important aspects of management include planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling, and problem-solving. Leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances. Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles.”

5. “When you go into a store, instead of telling the salesclerk what you “need,” you can describe what you’re looking for and ask for suggestions. Then, once you’ve picked out what you want, instead of hitting them with a hard offer, you can just say the price is a bit more than you budgeted and ask for help with one of the greatest-of-all-time calibrated questions: “How am I supposed to do that?”

6. A budget is more than just a series of numbers on a page; it is an embodiment of our values.” ― Barack Obama

7. Doing a budget means learning an ancient and powerful word: no.” — Dave Ramsey

8. “A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.” ― Dave Ramsey

9. “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

10. “A budget tells us what we can’t afford, but it doesn’t keep us from buying it.” – William Feather

11. We need more transparency and accountability in government so that people know how their money is being spent. That means putting budgets online, putting legislation online.

12. “You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.” ~ Joseph E. Levine

13. “The best way to look stylish on a budget is to try second-hand, bargain hunting, and vintage.” ― Orlando Bloom

14. “Personal relationships are the only thing that prevents breakdown in the systems structure. There is constant need for arbitration of conflicts between various members of the system, for adjudication of disputes or jurisdiction, on direction, on budgets, on people, on priorities, and so on. The most important people, regardless of their job descriptions or assigned tasks, spend most of their time keeping the machinery running. In no other organizational structure is the ratio between output and effort needed for internal cohesion as unfavorable as in the systems structure.”

15. Doing a budget means learning an ancient and powerful word: no.” — Dave Ramsey

16. “Our first idea is a grand opening, a big launch, a press release, or major media coverage. We default to thinking we need an advertising budget. Our delusion is that we should be Transformers and not The Blair Witch Project.”

17. A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.” — Dave Ramsey

18. “The biggest source of getting the country to a balanced budget is not by raising taxes or by cutting spending. It’s by encouraging the growth of the economy. ” Mitt Romney

19. “No matter how fast you push to open and how hard you try to stay on budget, little things pop up constantly. But, we’ve learned to deal with them with laughter and a shrug rather than with anger and frustration.” —Cayla Marvil, co-founder of Lamplighter Brewing Co.

20. “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” ― Joe Biden

21. “We need more transparency and accountability in government so that people know how their money is being spent. That means putting budgets online, putting legislation online.” Carly Fiorina

22. The budget is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations.” ― Jack Lew

23. Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” ~ Joe Biden

24. “In July 1997, the proposed new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh was estimated to cost up to £40 million. By June 1999, the budget for the building was £109 million. In April 2000, legislators imposed a £195 million “cap on costs.” By November 2001, they demanded an estimate of “final cost,” which was set at £241 million. That estimated final cost rose twice in 2002, ending the year at £294.6 million. It rose three times more in 2003, reaching £375.8 million by June. The building was finally completed in 2004 at an ultimate cost of roughly £431 million.”

25. “Harvard psychologist Max Bazerman once showed that when analyzing other people’s home renovation plans, most people estimate the project will run between 25% and 50% over budget.43 But when it comes to their own projects, people estimate that renovations will be completed on time and at budget. Oh, the eventual disappointment”

26. “It takes little to no budget — perhaps a shift in mindset — to give praise when you see someone doing something right, rather than waiting for a formal review.

27. “In other words, the budget process is not about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the Hedgehog Concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.”

28. “Bill C-9 was supposed to be a budget bill, but it came with innumerable measures that had little or nothing to do with the nation's finances. It was, as critics put it, the advance of the Harper agenda by stealth, yet another abuse of the democratic process. The bill was a behemoth. It was 904 pages, with 23 separate sections and 2,208 individual clauses....

29. After the $700 billion bails out, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don’t have. But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country.” – Michele Bachmann

30. We didn’t actually overspend our budget. The allocation simply fell short of our expenditure.”Keith Davis. 69.. If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” JP Getty.

31. “A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.”

32. “He began, “I know that the next couple of hours might be tedious, and that there are a hundred other things we’d all rather be doing right now. But let’s keep a few things in mind while we’re here today. First, our competitors are hoping we get this wrong. They’re hoping we underallocate resources for advertising, or hire too many administrative staff. And our employees are desperate for us to get this right, because every decision we make today has a profound impact on someone’s job, not to mention their morale. In their minds, our credibility is on the line. And finally, I don’t want to be sitting at my desk nine months from now thinking, ‘Why didn’t I pay closer attention during that budget review?’ So let’s sit forward in our seats and do this right so we can feel good about it for the rest of the year.”

33. “It takes little to no budget — perhaps a shift in mindset — to give praise when you see someone doing something right, rather than waiting for a formal review.

34. If you’re married, agree on the budget with your spouse. This one sentence requires a stand-alone book to describe how, but the bottom line is this: if you aren’t working together, it is almost impossible to win. Once the budget is agreed on and is in writing, pinky-swear and spit-shake that you will never do anything with money that is not on that paper. The paper is the boss of the money, and you are the boss of what goes on the paper, but you have to stick to the budget, or it’s just an elaborate theory.” — Dave Ramsey

35. “Management is a set of processes that can keep a complicated system of people and technology running smoothly. The most important aspects of management include planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling, and problem solving. Leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances. Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles”

36. “Team members have to be focused on the collective good of the team. Too often, they focus their attention on their department, their budget, their career aspirations, their egos.”

37. “When you go into a store, instead of telling the salesclerk what you “need,” you can describe what you’re looking for and ask for suggestions. Then, once you’ve picked out what you want, instead of hitting them with a hard offer, you can just say the price is a bit more than you budgeted and ask for help with one of the greatest-of-all-time calibrated questions: “How am I supposed to do that?”

38. A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.” – Dave Ramsey

39. “The light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off due to budget cuts.” Unknown

40. “As an old Washington Post editor named Robert Estabrook once said, “He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.” This same technique for suspending unbelief that you use with kidnappers and escaping patients works for anything, even negotiating prices. When you go into a store, instead of telling the salesclerk what you “need,” you can describe what you’re looking for and ask for suggestions. Then, once you’ve picked out what you want, instead of hitting them with a hard offer, you can just say the price is a bit more than you budgeted and ask for help with one of the greatest-of-all-time calibrated questions: “How am I supposed to do that?” The critical part of this approach is that you really are asking for help and your delivery must convey that. With this negotiating scheme, instead of bullying the clerk, you’re asking for their advice and giving them the illusion of control. Asking for help”

41. Christy Romano knows you can look great without destroying your budget. Find some cheaper ways to buy clothes or just make do with the ones you have. Looking the way you want should not come at that big of a cost.

42. “The budget is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations.” ― Jack Lew

43. The responsible woman in me is budgeting for groceries. The pregnant woman is going ‘Oooo! Chocolate Cake!’

44. “2. Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan. What’s the saying? You plan, God laughs. Financial and investment planning are critical, because they let you know whether your current actions are within the realm of reasonable. But few plans of any kind survive their first encounter with the real world. If you’re projecting your income, savings rate, and market returns over the next 20 years, think about all the big stuff that’s happened in the last 20 years that no one could have foreseen: September 11th, a housing boom and bust that caused nearly 10 million Americans to lose their homes, a financial crisis that caused almost nine million to lose their jobs, a record-breaking stock-market rally that ensued, and a coronavirus that shakes the world as I write this. A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality. A good plan doesn’t pretend this weren’t true; it embraces it and emphasizes room for error. The more you need specific elements of a plan to be true, the more fragile your financial life becomes. If there’s enough room for error in your savings rate that you can say, “It’d be great if the market returns 8% a year over the next 30 years, but if it only does 4% a year I’ll still be OK,” the more valuable your plan becomes. Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right. Room for error—often called margin of safety—is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance. It comes in many forms: A frugal budget, flexible thinking, and a loose timeline—anything that lets you live happily with a range of outcomes. It’s different from being conservative. Conservative is avoiding a certain level of risk. Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival. Its magic is that the higher your margin of safety, the smaller your edge needs to be to have a favorable outcome.”

45. “Bill C-9 was supposed to be a budget bill, but it came with innumerable measures that had little or nothing to do with the nation's finances. It was, as critics put it, the advance of the Harper agenda by stealth, yet another abuse of the democratic process. The bill was a behemoth. It was 904 pages, with 23 separate sections and 2,208 individual clauses....

46. Worried about finances as you prepare for baby? Learn how to budget and get tips for financially preparing for baby.

47. “I got a lousy proposition for you,” I said, and paused until each asked me to go on. “By the time we get off the phone, you’re going to think I’m a lousy businessman. You’re going to think I can’t budget or plan. You’re going to think Chris Voss is a big talker. His first big project ever out of the FBI, he screws it up completely. He doesn’t know how to run an operation. And he might even have lied to me.”

48. “I’m gonna be on a budget until the day I die.”

49. “Budgeting has only one rule: Do not go over budget.”

50. The biggest source of getting the country to a balanced budget is not by raising taxes or by cutting spending. It’s by encouraging the growth of the economy.” Mitt Romney

51. Twist and wring out the budget, work extra hours, sell something, or have a garage sale, but quickly get your $1,000. Most of you should hit this step in less than a month. If it looks as though it is going to take longer, do something radical. Deliver pizzas, work part-time, or sell something else. Get crazy. You are way too close to the edge of falling over a major money cliff here. Remember, if the Joneses (all the broke people) think you are cool, you are heading the wrong way. If they think you are crazy, you are probably on track.” — Dave Ramsey

52. “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” – Joe Biden

53. “The budget is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations.” ― Jack Lew

54. “A budget is more than just a series of numbers on a page; it is an embodiment of our values.” ― Barack Obama

55. “I’m used to very low-budget situations. In ‘The Exploding Girl,’ we were literally changing in Starbucks because we didn’t have trailers.” ~ Zoe Kazan

56. “As we understand it, everything is in the Bible for one reason – to teach us a lesson. Thus, in the beginning of the Bible, we see how God budgets His time for labor, and He saves the seventh day for rest, or retirement. The concept of budgeting was created by God to give us a life of prosperity in the world He created for us, so we should learn to budget as a way to emulate God in our financial life.”

57. “Cutting advertising budgets is so common. Almost 99.99% of the companies resort to this whenever any problem arises. But this actually makes the situation worse and those companies are never able to move out of their struggling phase.”

58. Dad, I know that you’ve always been there for me from my first day on this earth until now. The way you helped me figure out how to play catch, taught me how to drive, manage a budget and get along with girls has made us where we are today. It’s your fault that I’m not afraid of anything. I can thank you for teaching me important life skills such as how to do laundry, fix things around the house and pick up dirty socks off the floor without being told. But most importantly, thank you for being my brother-in-law and making my sister so happy! Happy Father’s Day!

59. Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

60. Shoe-string budgets and backpacking had taught me a lot about simple beauty and spontaneous fun. - Charlene Hicky

61. “Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right. Room for error—often called margin of safety—is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance. It comes in many forms: A frugal budget, flexible thinking, and a loose timeline— anything that lets you live happily with a range of outcomes.”

62. “Systematically targeting objectives and budgeting for them, creating plans to achieve those objectives, organizing for implementation, and then controlling the process to keep it on track – this is the essence of management.”

63. “Our first idea is a grand opening, a big launch, a press release, or major media coverage. We default to thinking we need an advertising budget. Our delusion is that we should be Transformers and not The Blair Witch Project.”

64. The responsible woman in me is budgeting for groceries. The pregnant woman is going ‘Oooo! Chocolate Cake!’

65. The responsible woman in me is budgeting for groceries. The pregnant woman is going “Oooo! Chocolate Cake!”

66. “of the simplest ways is obvious, but it often gets overlooked—that is performance. Your boss expects you to complete certain tasks. So complete them. Do them on time, on budget, and with as little drama as possible. Get the mission done.”

67. “Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.” – John Maxwell

68. “The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is difficult or impossible to conduct several at once. You could not compute the product of 17 × 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic, and you certainly should not try. You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.”

69. “Positional Leaders Feed on Politics When leaders value position over the ability to influence others, the environment of the organization usually becomes very political. There is a lot of maneuvering. Positional leaders focus on control instead of contribution. They work to gain titles. They do what they can to get the largest staff and the biggest budget they can—not for the sake of the organization’s mission, but for the sake of expanding and defending their turf. And when a positional leader is able to do this, it often incites others to do the same because they worry that others’ gains will be their loss. Not only does it create a vicious cycle of gamesmanship, posturing, and maneuvering, but it also creates departmental rivalries and silos.”

70. “Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.” – John Maxwell

71. “Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved—whether by their superiors or by a client—supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times. In”

72. “We tend to let our subsidiaries operate on their own, without our supervising and monitoring them to any degree. That means we are sometimes late in spotting management problems and that both operating and capital decisions are occasionally made with which Charlie and I would have disagreed had we been consulted. Most of our managers, however, use the independence we grant them magnificently, rewarding our confidence by maintaining an owner-oriented attitude that is invaluable and too seldom found in huge organizations. We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy. We now have about 257,000 employees and literally hundreds of different operating units. We hope to have many more of each. But we will never allow Berkshire to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations and multiple layers of management. Instead, we plan to operate as a collection of separately managed businesses, most of whose decision-making occurs at the operating level.”

73. Don’t tell me what you value; show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” – Joe Biden

74. “Room for error—often called margin of safety—is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance. It comes in many forms: A frugal budget, flexible thinking, and a loose timeline—anything that lets you live happily with a range of outcomes.”

75. “When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns—or even to be completed. In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book—it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.”

76. “The single biggest structural problem facing leaders of meetings is the tendency to throw every type of issue that needs to be discussed into the same meeting, like a bad stew with too many random ingredients. Desperate to minimize wasted time, leaders decide that they will have one big staff meeting, either once a week or every other week. They sit down in a room for two or three or four hours and hash everything out—sales strategies, expense policies, potential mergers, employee recognition programs, budgets, and branding—so that everyone can get back to their “real work.”

77. “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” — Joe Biden

78. “Humor enriches any conversation. Plan your humor and make it relevant. For example, if you’re going to a meeting on the budget, look up money in a quotation book. In an uptight business meeting, a little levity shows you’re at ease and can break the tension and win the appreciation of all.

79. “Churches for churched people obsess over the most frivolous, inconsequential things. It’s why you dread your board meetings, your elder meetings, and your committee meetings. You rarely talk about anything important. You’re managing found people. I know you care about un-found people in your heart. But do you care in your schedule, your programming, your preaching style, or your budget?”

80. “Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.... This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law. Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline.”

81. “While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187”

82. The budget is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations.” ― Jack Lew

83. “you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.”

84. “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” ― Joe Biden

85. The best way to look stylish on a budget is to try second-hand, bargain hunting, and vintage.” ― Orlando Bloom

86. A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.” ― Dave Ramsey

87. “What is the purpose of budgeting? Most”

88. “A movie like House of the Dead with around $7 million budget or Alone in the Dark with around $16 million budget is much easier to make a profit than the typical $50 million major motion picture.”

89. Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” –Joe Biden

90. My parents didn’t have much money growing up, but they always had a budget for books.

91. “Every family in America knows they have to do a budget. Every small business in America knows they have to do a budget. Every local government, every state, knows they have to do a budget.” — John Boehner

92. “The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.”

93. Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” ― Joe Biden

94. “Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan … Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right. Room for error—often called margin of safety—is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance. It comes in many forms: A frugal budget, flexible thinking, and a loose timeline—anything that lets you live happily with a range of outcomes.”

95. “The biggest source of getting the country to a balanced budget is not by raising taxes or by cutting spending. It’s by encouraging the growth of the economy.” Mitt Romney

96. “We tend to let our subsidiaries operate on their own, without our supervising and monitoring them to any degree. That means we are sometimes late in spotting management problems and that both operating and capital decisions are occasionally made with which Charlie and I would have disagreed had we been consulted. Most of our managers, however, use the independence we grant them magnificently, rewarding our confidence by maintaining an owner-oriented attitude that is invaluable and too seldom found in huge organizations. We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy. We now have about 257,000 employees and literally hundreds of different operating units. We hope to have many more of each. But we will never allow Berkshire to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations and multiple layers of management. Instead, we plan to operate as a collection of separately managed businesses, most of whose decision-making occurs at the operating level.”

97. “While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187”

98. “Churches for churched people obsess over the most frivolous, inconsequential things. It’s why you dread your board meetings, your elder meetings, and your committee meetings. You rarely talk about anything important. You’re managing found people. I know you care about un-found people in your heart. But do you care in your schedule, your programming, your preaching style, or your budget?”

99. Live by a budget.

100. “The biggest source of getting the country to a balanced budget is not by raising taxes or by cutting spending. It’s by encouraging the growth of the economy. ” Mitt Romney