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When your budget doesn’t “work”
If you’ve set up a budget for your family, congratulations! You’ve already taken a major step in the right direction for your family. But just creating the budget is one thing; making the budget actually work is another.
This is an area of personal finance where there can be an incredible amount of guilt. We feel like we should be better at budgeting. It’s part of being an adult, right?
We tell ourselves that we should be sticking to the numbers, and not going over. We shouldn’t be spending that much on food, this much on our nails, or however much on random things at Target.
But in order to have a healthy relationship with our money, we have to come to a better understanding of how and why we sometimes naturally have a hard time sticking to our plans for our money.
So today, I’d like to discuss what it even means to say that a budget is “working,” as well as some of the reasons that budgets fail in the first place.
A budget that “works”
Budgeting, at the core, is about setting an intention for earning, spending, and saving during a certain time period. But life doesn’t always go as intended. If you meant to spend $500 on groceries, but you spent $510, does that mean your budget failed?
