Yeah, I know; my budget is fat.
There! I said. The elephant is no longer just sitting in the middle of the room being ignored!
It’s not like I haven’t tried putting it on a diet. I have, but for some reason it never sticks. Every time I turn my back it is stuffing another expense down its greedy throat.
If you have spent any time reading personal finance blogs online then you probably already know what the gurus recommend. The Lord only knows how much time I have spent refining my family’s monthly budget.
The problem is that budgets evolve over time. One spending event always seems to trigger a few more unwanted ones. My best guess at the beginning of the month is never close to what it should have been.
Actual Budgeted Amounts
For instance, our budget (using percentages to protect the innocent) at the beginning of January looked something like this:
Housing – 29%
Utilities – 12%
Groceries – 15%
Transportation – 5%
Clothing – 2%
Medical (including prescriptions) – 3%
Personal/Household Items – 5%
Education – 6%
Entertainment – 1%
Blow Money – 2%
Debt Repayment – 18%
Our actual expenses, however, turned out to be a lot different. If I am being honest, we spent more than we budgeted on virtually every category; way more.
As an example, everyone in our family has been sick over the past few weeks. I am talking about the ‘don’t feel like moving, who is going to get up with the infant’ type of sick. Our MO, of late, has been to simply grab something quick for dinner (or lunch); sometimes fast food, sometimes something from the grocery store. The real issue is that we bought specific food items for a specific meal and now we have spent even more.
Since we use the envelope system, and do not have room in the budget for these types of mistakes, we often grab cash from a different envelope (I know we aren’t supposed to do that). Of course, when we go to use cash from the robbed envelope there is none left; so we steal cash from another. And so on and so on!
Eventually, there is no cash left and we are forced to tap into our emergency fund. But it is really an emergency? If this only happened every now and then I would not really worry too much.
Unfortunately, it seems to happen every month.
Every month we put our budget on a diet yet every month the bank account seems to be the only one losing anything. Our debt certainly isn’t going away by itself.
So how do you keep yourself from spending more than you budget? How do you keep your budget from eating itself to death? I would certainly be interested in your thoughts.