Budget Blunders
There are so many ways to do a budget wrong! One thing I tell people is that our financial journey was not some story of success from the get go. My husband and I had to learn some very tough lesson in life. Today, in line with our budgeting series this week, I am going to discuss the blunders of budgeting. My hope is that you can learn from our hard lessons-before you hit the roadblocks. If you need some great budgeting tools, check out my Budgeting Tools post.
Save Where You Can
Save, save, save! I cannot stress this enough. When Donny and I got married, we lived paycheck to paycheck. The truth was that we spent too much on frivolous things. When emergencies came up–which they did–we had no way to counter those emergencies. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, I ask that you carefully examine what is necessary in your life and what is not. If you haven’t hit the emergencies already, you will. You do not want your family to be put in a bad position because you chose not to save. I don’t care if its $5 a week or $5000 a month that you save. You just got to do it!
Fun Money
You need a fun money category. You might think it is possible, but your will power has to be that of a God. Most of you ladies witness this every time you go into Target. You go in for something that you need that costs $5 and come out spending $150. It happens! You need to account for this. You will be sorry and your budget will be a disaster if you do not.
Do not Hyper-Focus
With this in mind, you do not want to over focus on saving, or on any category for that matter. You need to have a balanced budget that includes healthy slices in each category. I will be honest with you, for a year or so, I was in this mode of saving very intensely. It left our family budget very unrealistic. In fact, it caused some fights between my husband and I. Its all about balance.
