Sticking to Your Budget: The Good, Bad, and Ugly

Matt and I have been thinking a lot about the concept of sticking to your budget. We dropped down to one income in January and really tightened up our spending.

We are trying to use Mint religiously. It forces us to think about how much money we have in each category. Each week, for example, I take items out of my online cart if I’m starting to go over our grocery budget. We also opt for free things rather than paid activities, if we know we are going to exceed our Entertainment budget. We only get something on Amazon if we have cash back bonus points from our credit cards.

The good news is that this approach helps us save money. And we need every penny as we try to reserve AirBnBs for a Family Gap Year. The other good news is that it provides many opportunities to talk to our children about how we want to save our money so we can afford bigger and better things.

The bad news is that our budget feels tight! For example, we only have $100 for Entertainment. That goes really fast for us! For example, we can’t go to Alamo Drafthouse for dinner and a movie with all four of us. So we’ve been opting for free entertainment, like going to Barton Springs.

The “ugly” is that I don’t really love the interactions that ensue when I’m trying to keep our family on budget. I’m the one who cares the most, so I become the appointed Keeper of the Budget. For example, Matt volunteered to photograph an event for a non-profit organization. I was out of town at a conference, so he had to pay a babysitter. He doesn’t even think about where that money is going to come from. So then I have to talk to him about it, and it feels annoying and petty. And yet that’s how budgets work!

Despite those annoyances, January was a good month for us.

Are any of you working on sticking to your budget right now?