Budget Living: How To Stick With Your Personal Spending Plan
It takes time before living on a budget becomes a way of life. Having a personal spending plan that manages how you allocate your money is one thing, sticking to a budget over time is another.
Change is always difficult and living on a budget is definitely a big change especially when you are used to spending whatever you want, whenever you want like I was. It wasn’t easy for me to stick with my budget at first, but I learned that budgeting is mostly about attitude.
Thoughts about how to stick with budget living
There are some important things to keep in mind during those first several months of budgeting. Mainly, your budget has to survive in order for it to help you achieve success. Here are some of my thoughts about living on a budget.
1. Don’t get frustrated when your budget doesn’t go as planned
A budget is just a plan. It has to adapt to real life circumstances. I used to hate it when things came up in a month that totally blew my spending plan. I’d have everything laid out perfectly for the month and then wham! Something I forgot or something unplanned would come up and I’d have to change several allocations to make things work.
At first, this really frustrated and discouraged me. Sometimes it made me want to give up, but over time, I’ve come to realize that this is just the way budgeting works. I learned to be more flexible. I go into the month with a plan, but I adjust without worrying about it so much. I recall that the most important budget goal is to spend less than I earn. It is not for my budget to go as planned.
2. Be realistic with your monthly spending allocations
Another source of frustration for me was running out of money in an important spending category before the end of the month. This made me feel like I was always blowing the budget. After awhile, I realized that if I kept going over every month in a category even though I was doing my best to control my spending, then I wasn’t being realistic with my allocation in that category.
Evaluate your budget allocations carefully. If something isn’t working, then don’t keep doing it the same way. Change your allocations. Give more money to groceries if that’s where you keep going over. There are always adjustments that can be made. It often takes several months to fine tune your allocations. I still tweak my budget almost every month.
3. Just do it and don’t give up!
With budgeting, it can often feel like you are taking two steps forward and one step back. However, you have to realize that this is still one step forward. You are making progress it is just slower than what you would prefer.
One thing that my wife did in the early days of our budget that helped me was to create some graphs of how our debt was going down while our savings was going up. I’m a visual person and looking at those graphs helped me to see that we really were making progress. It might help you too!
Budgeting works if you maintain the right attitude about it
Getting started with budget living is tough. It takes the right attitude and determination. However, the pay off is worth it. Budgeting helped me and my wife to pay off our debts in less than two years. In today’s economy, it is really nice being debt-free and having some cash in the bank!
What things do you do to avoid frustration and stick with your budget?
Photo by AMagill
Great post. I have found that I need to adjust my budget monthly. Those unexpected expense come up, but at least I have a ‘buffer’ category for it. That is very helpful.
There’s a great way to pull a little (or a lot) extra out of the spend on weekly groceries at http://www.mygrocerydeals.com. It’s like a google search engine for the best local deals on groceries. Put the grocery expenses into a chart and watch the line go down by as much as 40%.
@Bobbi – I also adjust my budget monthly. Every month is a little different so I find it works best for me to tweak things a little. Some of my allocations are the same every month, but others flucuate based on what I expect to happen over the course of a month.
@Brett – I’ll have to check out the site that you mentioned. It sounds interesting!
Thanks for your comments!
Thanks for the encouragement!
I’d have to say my largest frustration with my budget is the grocery category. I’m not sure I want to increase the value allocated there – but on the other hand I don’t want to keep going over
I think I’ll have to meet it half way, but continuing to concentrate on reducing my grocery spending but also increasing the allocation slightly.
But looking at the figures, and seeing how I can get everything back into “managed” territory is the main thing that keeps me motivated about the budget. And seeing that it is possible to pay off all our debt is a huge motivator.
Read Jason´s latest article – Links for Living To Budget – 27th December 2008
I have found Mvelopes (an online budgeting program) to be extremely helpful! It works like the old-fashioned envelope system, but automatically tracks your credit card transactions.
Read Joy (from Just Plain Joy)´s latest article – Sound Mind, Sound Mom Book Club
For a couple of months I struggled to setup my accounts and budget using MS Money (very simular to Quicken). What I found was that it gave me a good – sometimes too anal – view of where we spent our money, but without a good sense of how to budget our money and plan for recurring and unexpected expenses. Just yesterday I discovered You Need A Budget (YNAB) and was so excited about it I stayed up late getting it setup. The reason I was excited isn’t because I don’t have a life, rather it is good to see a program that lets me simply focus on creating a budget and planning for how to stay within it. Not exciting at all, but compared to Money or Quicken it is a heck of a lot easier to see where things are and how to get a handle on getting out of debt. Please understand I have no interest in the company (eg, no share in people who buy it) and don’t have any involvement except as a user. Go check it out:
http://www.youneedabudget.com/
Read Philip´s latest article – Making 2009 Shine. Bite-Sized Goals Taste Better and Go Down Easier.
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I find that http://www.neobudget.com does an excellent job of getting a budget set up in a simple, user friendly way based on the envelope system. It really helps me visualize my allocations and how much money is in what place. The envelope system is what really works for me, but I don’t like carrying cash so having virtual envelopes is great.
Mvelopes is great, but to me it is just too expensive. For me, Neobudget a great way to stick to a budget on a budget (haha). I have no interest in the company and they aren’t paying me for my comments, by the way.