How Not to Blow Your Budget
When living life on a budget the hardest part is not blowing your budget. If you aren’t living on a budget yet, go check out my free budget form. If you want to know how to not blow your budget once you set it, let’s talk about that.
The most common busted budget categories are food, fuel, and personal spending. Yes inflation has made every category harder to stay in, but the budget is meant to help you see how much money you have and where it is all going to go to. The best part is that you get to decide how much of your income goes to each category. Here is a percentage guideline for your budget. While that is a guideline you may have to adjust for the size of your family, lifestyle and what it is that you value. When I make my budget my transportation line is my most troubling one. When I first started budgeting with an every dollar budget, I often struggled to stay on budget with fuel for my car and repairs. So my gas category is now set much higher than the recommended percentage due to my lifestyle. I travel a lot for work and put on 3x the amount of miles that most people do in a year. Now that I know that, I am much better at staying on budget and not busting that category. Pay attention to the things that you are spending money on and areas that you tend to over spend and don’t feel bad about adjusting percentages up and down based on how you live your life. Remember this is your budget and you are creating the life you want to live.
Mastering your categories is another way to not bust the budget. Miscellaneous category is a must! Definitely my favorite category because I dump charges in there that would normally stress me out trying to find where they go or trying to remember what that was from. I have a large misc fund because I don’t like to stress over my budget and stuff comes up every month that I may not have been planning for. Common budget busters that can mess you up without a misc category are things like kids sports, birthday party gifts, coffee stops, and snacks.
Another tip for not busting the budget is to check your budget before spending. This may seem obvious, but you might be shocked at how many people make a budget and then never look at it again and then wonder where all their money went. When you set your budget make sure to check it before spending so that you know how much money is left in your budget category. Digital apps make this easy to do on your phone as you shop and drop purchases into categories. If you prefer paper and pen make sure to keep track of your purchases and subtract any spending from there so you have a running tally of how much is left to spend.
Lastly for categories you bust often get cash to spend and once your cash is gone you know you have no money left to spend in that line item of the budget.
Hopefully with these tips you will be able to take control of your budget and avoid blowing it.
Tiffany
