Counties With the Best & Worst Budgeters in 2025: WalletHub Study

Having a well-planned budget that you stick to is one of the most important ways to improve your finances. When you make a budget, you get to plan out exactly how you use your income, which ensures that essential bills get taken care of first and helps you work toward financial goals like building an emergency fund, paying down debt, or saving for a big purchase.

With more than 2 in 3 Americans saying that budgeting better is one of their top priorities for 2025, the personal-finance website WalletHub has recently released a new report on the Counties With the Best and Worst Budgeters, as well as expert commentary, to highlight where Americans are demonstrating the best financial skills and where they’re in need of improvement.

In order to find out where Americans have the best budgeting habits, WalletHub compared more than 2,800 counties based on 11 key metrics, ranging from the share of households without a bank account to the credit card delinquency rate to the share of households with zero net worth.

Commenting on the findings of the report, Chip Lupo, WalletHub Analyst, said, “Although inflation has experienced a general downward trend over the past year, it’s started to rise again during the past few months, and many Americans are still struggling financially. As a result, it’s extremely important to have good budgeting skills in order to make sure all your essential expenses get paid while still leaving room for saving, debt payoff, and at least a few ‘wants’ to maintain your mental health.”

“Los Alamos County in New Mexico has the country’s best budgeters. Only 6% of households in the county don’t have enough liquid assets to survive at the poverty level for at least three months without any new income. This demonstrates that people are including emergency fund contributions in their budgets, which is extremely important. In addition, people in Los Alamos County leave an adequate amount of money in their budget for paying back debts. This is clear because the county has the lowest share of people with student loan debt in default and the sixth-lowest credit card delinquency rate,” Lupo added.

To ensure that your financial life is as successful as possible, you will need to do more than just create a budget. You’ll also need to track it on a daily or weekly basis to make sure you stick to your plan. If you do that, you’ll maximize your chances of being among the best budgeters in America.

5 Tips for Better Budgeting

1. Plan things out: If you take the time to draw up a detailed plan, your odds of sticking to it will increase. Before you start, be sure to familiarize yourself with the basic process of making a budget, including gathering information about your finances, setting long-term goals, ordering your expenses by priority and assigning them an appropriate amount of your income. The better you understand the importance of budgeting, the more you’ll be able to improve your credit score, avoid overspending, and prepare yourself for the future.
    
2. Leverage free budgeting tools: There are some great free budgeting tools online that can help you build your perfect budget using a variety of templates. Sometimes, these tools can even sync with your accounts to automatically track your spending and make it much easier to see your progress.
    
3. Try different budgeting strategies: Different budgeting methods work best for different people. For example, you might want a budget that focuses on making sure every dollar is assigned to something specific (zero-based budgeting), one that sets specific percentages for needs, wants and savings (such as the 50/30/20 budget rule), or one that sets strict limits on individual spending categories (envelope method). You may need to try out a few types before deciding what works best for you.
    
4. Prioritize the right things: Your first priority should be making payments on your debts. Next, you should focus on paying your essential monthly expenses and saving money for the future. Once you’ve put money toward all of those things, you can set some aside for “wants.”
    
5. Stick to your budget: The best way to track your progress is to sync your bank accounts and credit cards to a budgeting app so you can easily see changes day by day. It’s also good to remind yourself of your long-term budgeting goals often by having them written down in a prominent place. You can ask a friend or family member to help keep you accountable, too!