*As a reminder, Year of Plenty posts are written by Chris.*
Do you use a budgeting app, or some kind of personal finance tool? One of my favorites is YNAB — You Need A Budget. After setup and a little bit of education, YNAB is super simple to use. I personally like it because of the methods that it uses because it forces you to budget down to the dollar, and doesn’t allow you to budget outside of the money that you already have. Plus, it makes you allocate every single dollar. That’s a lot different than other budgeting styles that budget based on assumed income, but don’t allow for flexibility.
But anyway, this post isn’t meant to be a commercial for YNAB (as much as I’d LOVE a sponsor, haha!). What I want to talk about is one of YNAB’s “rules” for budgeting. Their recommendation for budgeting is to “roll with the punches.” What do they mean by that? Simply this: “Overspending is not a sign of failure. On the contrary, it’s a normal part of your financial life. What matters is how you deal with it.”
As much as I would love to be able to know EXACTLY how much we are going to spend on various things, sometimes the reality can be a lot different. Let’s take a look at October’s expenses as an example. Three things happened outside of our expectations:
- Elaine got called to do a last minute shoot in San Antonio.
- We needed to get new tires for our primary family vehicle.
- I had to travel out of state because of a family emergency.
The San Antonio shoot was great — in fact, the income she got from that shoot will help carry us all the way to January (as we breathe a monumental sigh of relief!!). But that kind of work comes with extra expenses that we hadn’t accounted for until planning for the trip: a hotel stay, food on the way up and down, gas costs, etc. Some of that is built into what she makes, but it doesn’t take away from that fact that it’s a required expense!
For the new tires, this was one of those face-palm moments, and a good lesson moving forward. In a perfect budgeting world, we would just have a line item, broken up over two to three years that allocates $50 per month for new tires for each car. That way, when the time comes, we just have the money and there’s no blinking an eye. Unfortunately, due to our lack of forethought prior to the Year of Plenty, we had to bite the bullet and just pay for it up front. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have the money, but it also wasn’t an anticipated need before we started this journey. At the end of the year, we’ll need to account for expenses like this. And we’ll have to accept that small expenses like this could push us over the $40,000 goal limit we set for the year.
The travel out of state is an interesting one. I’m a Prius owner… and a proud one. Because of this, gas tends to be relatively cheap for me. On a good day, I’ll get close to 50 miles per gallon. So my trip to Louisiana, which was about 325 miles, only cost me about $30 in gas. But that’s an extra $30 that we didn’t account for.
All in all, we spent about $800 more than we would’ve liked to spend this month. But rolling with the punches — not beating myself up about overspending, and just adjusting our future spending habits — should help us to deal with this as time moves forward.
If you already budget, but struggle with overspending a little here and there, I want to encourage you. That’s relatively normal! You can’t anticipate everything. Sometimes electricity will be high, or you’ll have a surprise medical bill. That doesn’t mean you need to throw in the towel. It just means you need to re-allocate, readjust, and move forward.
Don’t sweat it. Instead, gently change course when you realize the problem.