About BuildMyBudget.com

Welcome!

My name is Chris Fitzgerald and I'm the creator and owner of BuildMyBudget. Together with my wife Monica, we own Stress Free Plan, LLC which operates BuildMyBudget. We are an online consulting company which focuses on helping individuals successfully build and maintain a budget. BuildmyBudget.com provides financial tools to help build a financial foundation and resources such as forum and blogging capabilities for discussing financial topics and issues.

So why did I create BuildMyBudget.com?

When I was a financial advisor I drove all around the state of Florida trying to sell financial products to anyone who would listen to me. I had to focus primarily on selling insurance products because they created revenue for my company and generated the highest commissions. I quickly realized this is not how I wanted to spend my time. Growing up in a family with nine siblings and experiencing extreme financial hardship is why I majored in Finance-- so that I could assist others by helping them understand the power of money. I found that when I met with a potential client to help them invest for their future or solve an insurance need, they knew surprisingly little about how much they could afford to invest each month, let alone what their retirement savings or net worth was! It became an obvious pattern to find that most people do not sit down and figure out what their income minus their expenses is on a monthly basis, or what their free-cash-flow might be. On top of that, they never knew when their bills were due so they couldn’t determine what day of the month they could afford to invest $50. More often than not, each person I met with admitted that it would be too difficult to manage another payment each month as they were already being overwhelmed with bills, statements, and other financial obligations.

Interestingly, I was having the same kind of issues in College. I was tired of wasting time with unnecessary financial software, tired of waiting to see how much of my paycheck was left over after paying bills, tired of not knowing where I was headed financially and just simply fed up with reacting to my financial situation. I wanted a way to minimize the amount of financial stress I had in my life, and that is what led me to create the BuildMyBudget method and Stress Free Plan, LLC.

My goal is to create a simple, flexible, inexpensive, user-friendly solution to help you determine your current financial path, manage your bills and other financial obligations, identify how you can realistically reach financial goals, and learn about how to improve your financial situation without buying unnecessary financial software or giving away vital personal information. The ease of use and flexibility of a spreadsheet-style budget combined with a minimal time commitment yields an inexpensive method for forecasting future income and expenses so that you can make accurate financial decisions quickly and effectively. The BuildMyBudget method for managing your money is a stress-free way for you to project your financial path quickly and to the dollar.

Please feel free to visit the forum to provide feedback or you can contact us with questions or comments. Thanks for visiting BuildMyBudget.com!

Chris Fitzgerald, CEO

BuildMyBudget.com