It’s no secret that Dave Ramsey lives in my house. Even if we don’t have a budget set for the month, he’s still in these four walls. Here’s the thing about not having a monthly budget, he’s here in a not fun way. I know it’s a reflection of his principles and our belief in them that causes the guilt, but man, the guilt. I’m too afraid to look back to the last month that we actually made a budget, but I’m pretty sure it’s been a good six months. Here’s the thing, some months (most?) it worked in our favor. Meaning, we didn’t spend more than we would have wanted to. That doesn’t mean we don’t still feel guilty.
- Guilt. Even when you don’t spend too much money, you still feel guilty that you spent any because it wasn’t accounted for and tracked. I think, for the most part, when we don’t create a budget we get in each other’s heads and go into extreme savings mode. We assume that since we aren’t tracking the money, then we don’t have it to spend. Which in turn makes more guilt when you do spend money. Money that you probably have to spend. But, you don’t know that because you didn’t create a monthly budget. You see where I’m going with this?! When you live like no one else, you can’t turn it on and off. You have to commit and be diligent.
- Miss goals. We’ve missed some family & financial goals over the past few months. The irony is that it’s not because we spent the money. It’s because we weren’t focused on our monies or goals. We could have started projects sooner, but we were in this self-inflicted feeling of not having any money. We didn’t realize that our savings had reached the point of moving forward with the project. When we got antsy to move on projects, then we had to spend extra time going over every dollar and figuring out if we really could start. Just because we saw the money, didn’t mean we hadn’t missed something else over the past few months. It wasn’t a complete setback, but it still took a lot of time and mental willingness to move forward.
- Inaccurate spend. There have been a few changes to our normally line items over the past few months. For instance, we’ve spent the past six weeks carpooling and are driving a shorter distance. We have absolutely no idea what our gasoline budget is for the month. One, because we aren’t sure what an accurate amount was when we stopped budgeting. And, we didn’t do a budget last month so we have to do some research on spend last month to predict this month. Again, time wasted. Another item is our grocery spend. We’ve been buying most of our groceries out of the organic section and with it being summer we’re going through a lot more fruit. This is another item that has been ongoing for quite a while and we don’t know where it’s at. Each monthly budget is based on the past month and then things coming up this month. We can’t accurately plan without knowing how these line items have shifted. More time wasted.
- Failed savings. We said this winter that we needed to start Quinten’s college savings fund. It’s July and we haven’t done it yet. Nor have we investigated to see if we’re doing the same thing as we do for Maximus. It’s one of those unchecked items that continues to linger in the background. Adding to the guilt in item one. We rarely move money from one savings account to something else, so even though we’ve been saving money that could be for his college, we haven’t been. We work under the philosophy that the accounts stay as they are and money doesn’t getting taken out of them. If we want something new, we add it to the goal list and save up for it. Or, we look at our monthly spend and add it to the current or next month. {This philosophy is probably what makes us end those non-budgeted months with more in savings than we thought!}
As you can see, we’re spending July getting back on track. We’ve put our Excel budget spreadsheet on hold and are testing out a new budget app that we put our monthly budget into and then track our spend. So far we like it. It helps us see what we have left to spend on each line item and I enjoy seeing the pie charts of categories. July is always a tough month because of summer life and Maximus’ birthday. We know it’s coming, but that unexpected extra spend always gets us. Like, how much should we really spend?? We’re 4 1/2 years into this financial journey and we still have a hard time staying focused. I can tell this is going to be a lifelong journey!
What are your tricks to staying focused on your budget?
