Let’s be honest. The idea of a budget sounds constricting, stressful and downright scary. Having to keep track of what you spend, be responsible in your purchasing, and make the conscious decision to pick one want over another does not sound like fun. But one day, when you are ready, you will realize you need to make a change.
Money and finances have been identified as one of the biggest causes of divorce. If you’re lucky enough to have an amazing partner then money is, at the very least, a huge point of stress. Whether you make $30,000 a year or $300,000 per year I can guarantee you worry about money. People tend to live within their means, and some most of us, will stretch beyond those means to get the things we want or create the life we want. This stretch means creating debt and debt makes more stress. It’s a vicious cycle really. The key to losing the stress is losing the debt and the key to losing the debt is creating a budget and using it. If you’re lucky enough to have not yet dug yourself in to the negative then you have head start, but remember that budgeting isn’t just for those in debt or those who are considered “poor”. Whatever your financial level may be, budgeting can help decrease stress by giving you the chance to choose what to do with your money instead of wondering where the money is going to come from to pay for the things you’ve already done.
Jimmy and I started our journey to financial freedom in January of 2017. We were pregnant with our daughter after almost 3 years of fertility treatments. You want to talk about stress… Aside from the emotional roller coaster, there is a level of financial torture that accompanies trying to create a family that is hard to describe. You have this desire to have this little baby and with every fail there is a glimmer of hope the we “almost” made it, or it might work if we just try again, and you dig yourself deeper and deeper in to this rabbit hole with each step costing more and more money. Anyway, back to budgeting. Plenty of time to talk fertility later.
As I was saying, Jimmy and I started this journey January 2017. We sifted through 3 previous months finances and took a good, ugly look at what we had been spending as well as all of our current debts: credit cards, cars, medical bills, etc. Then we sat down and plugged our numbers in to a budgeting app. We use Every Dollar. It allows you to both see the budget and log spending in real time.
Initially I fought this process. I had been doing our finances for the past 4 years, gotten us through new homes, vacations, cars, and even our IVF journey. We were doing great in my mind and I didn’t think that I needed to report every dollar I spent. I didn’t want my husband to realize how much I spent on skincare products, makeup and clothes. I didn’t want to be judged nor did I want him to feel constricted in his spending. But we agreed that we would do this. We were both in it for better or for worse.
The first few months were a little hard, but as time went on and we started checking off the debts and watched our savings grow and grow. It was an incredible feeling and, you know what? I didn’t feel constricted. We included room for everything in the budget and I found it fun to try to see how much we could save each month. We were still going out to dinner, still decorating our new home, and still prepping for our new baby. The only difference was the transparency.
Here we are a little over a year since we started our journey. Our income has not changed but we have been able to pay off our fertility treatments, my car, our medical bills, furniture loan, put more in to retirement, open various other investments, and so much more. Budget sounds like such a scary and constricting word, but it’s not. It can release this stress that you may not have even known was hovering over you. It allows you to see the future and be exciting about planning on what to spend your money on next!
You may not think budgeting is for you right now, and it may not be, but if you’re looking to decrease some stress in your relationship or even just your life I have a few tips that helped me get through it.
Ready to budget? Take a look at the next steps:
- 5 Tips for Budgeting
- How We Paid Off $120,000 of Debt in Less than 24 months
- Destroying the Stigma of Budgeting: “I could never live like that.”
- What is Financial Independence (FI)?
- 6 Spending Habits you NEED to Break
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