The department stores are promising savings this year as they have every other. Come one, come all, sales all day. Buy two, save 50 percent. Free financing.

But we should know by now that it’s all just advertising lingo meant to prey on our anxieties and fears. Achieving real savings is harder than swiping a card. Buying a pair of Beats headphones for half-off still shows up on the income statement as a loss. In accounting terms, nothing is being saved. It’s just a matter of perceived value.

This is why everyone, especially college students, should  make and maintain a personal budget — and the holiday season is a good time to start.

The holiday season entails lavish spending, with little attention paid to the balances in our bank accounts. All too often, looking at the total line on our statements is our only way of measuring what we spend. The rest we leave up to what we can hazily recall about what we bought and when.

Humans were not meant to evolve with a monetary value attached to us. Banks will differentiate between business and personal accounts, but in reality, we should all be operating like businesses when it comes to money because there is no part of our brain that is wired to know how to handle it.

One thing we all have in common is that we have costs that require our attention. They come in the form of food, car payments, utilities and entertainment, among other things. Any Syracuse University student with a negative income knows that our accounts tend to hemorrhage away funds to these destinations with alarming speed.

The No. 1 reason to create a budget is so you can see exactly where all your money is going. The more classifications the better, that way you can see where you’re overspending. An informative report from Personal Finance at Duke recommends generating a spreadsheet for fixed, such as rent, phone, variable, like food, gas, and nonessential, as in movies, lattes, costs. From there, you can go even further to pinpoint how much is going where.

The struggling college student may notice that once everything is added up, there are a few surprisingly high costs. Deep down in your heart you might know the daily Dunkaccino may not be necessary, but knowing you spent $60 on them this month may be the slap in the face you need to get that number down to $20. That leaves $40 to allocate towards gas, rent or savings. Continual adjustments like these are key to balancing the budget, which any business needs to succeed.

So when the holidays come around and you must absorb the shock of buying expensive gifts, it would be a good idea to set some goals about where you want to be financially. Then, once you record and classify your expenses, you can set a budget of how much you want to spend. Looking back and analyzing your expenses and income will inevitably simplify the mystery of personal finance and close the black hole that is your spending habits.

The language of business is money. Because we have the luxury of having even a little cash available to us, we need to operate like a business and not lose sight of where that money goes.

Phil Kramer is a sophomore finance and economics major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected].

Published on November 30, 2014 at 11:30 am