If You Regularly Exceed Your Budget, It’s Time to Change It.
Your monthly budget for things like food, utilities, or other variable costs is more often a guideline than a calculation. If you frequently exceed these budgets, don’t keep lying to yourself and adjusting to the storytelling. Change your budget instead.
As the personal finance blog Enemy of Debt explains, it’s pretty easy to lie to yourself about your budget. You say you will only eat out of the house twice a month, but you end up eating four or five times. If this happens once, it is a mistake. If this happens once a month, then this is not a mistake. Your budget for eating out is five times a month. Rather than “fixing” your budget every month, simply adjust your budget by cutting costs elsewhere:
Just because you have a budget does not mean that you are genuine about your spending. At one point, I had $ 100 a week for groceries, and we surpassed that almost every week. We just haven’t been telling the truth about how much we can cut our grocery spending. This led to the need for frequent budget adjustments to compensate for surplus products. In the end, we increased our grocery budget to a more reasonable amount and found another item that we were able to cut to keep our budget intact.
Your budget should reflect your actual expenses, not the ideal that you would like to realize. Yes, it would be great if you had a smaller grocery budget, but if you don’t, then pretending that you are will only avoid saving money in other areas. Be honest with your budget, and if you exceed certain categories each month, that could be a sign that you need to change it.
Are you lying to yourself about your finances? | Enemy of Debt via Rockstar Finance