In Lesson 2 of my Financial Literacy course, I walk you through budgeting with Actual Budget. The whole point here is to get a simple, practical system in place so you can tell your money where to go instead of wondering where it went. I show the basics of using Actual Budget to manage your budget for free, and I focus on the parts that matter when you’re just getting started: setting up your budget, organizing categories, and using the tool as your day-to-day “source of truth” for spending decisions. I also explain the big decision people get stuck on: running Actual Budget with or without a server. You can absolutely use it locally, but if you want to share data between devices or access your budget in a web browser, a server setup is where that becomes useful. My goal is to keep this approachable—no finance fluff—just a clean workflow you can stick to, whether you’re budgeting on one machine or syncing across your whole setup.