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