An unexpected benefit of budgeting

When I started formal budgeting & tracking of my finances last June, I never considered that it would make me feel less guilty about spending money. Somehow, ensuring every dollar has a purpose, and tracking how they were actually spent calms me and makes me feel better about spending in general. An article on YNAB, “The Power of Planned Purchasing” talks about just this phenomenon.

Rest assured that a planned purchase is usually a reasonable purchase because of the thought, time, effort, strategizing, etc. mentioned above. Please don’t feel bad if you’re spending planned money!

It really works like that

For example, buying gifts this year was much less agonizing than usual for my wife and me. We had a set budget, in cash. We wrote a list of people to gift, and then we bought presents within our budget. It was so pleasant not to “upsell ourselves” and rationalize expensive gifts because they would be “so nice.” It is remarkably exhausting, the mental static caused by wanting to buy something more expensive and fighting back-and-forth in your head about doing it. Interestingly, I only really noticed how exhausting it used to be when I stopped doing it.

As another example, our home repairs have become less stressful. I put aside a set amount of money every month into a sub-account earmarked for that purpose. Then, if we need to spend some money on the house, we just spend it. We try to get a good deal, of course, but we don’t need to debate the priority of new blinds for the front window. We’ve saved for just that reason, and we don’t need to feel any guilt about using the money for that purpose.

But you do spend the money differently

Continuing the blinds example, it is unlikely we’d have ever bought the blinds we wanted if we were just looking at monthly bills, or (the nasty way we used to do it) our bank balance. “It looks pretty tight this month”, we’d say, every time we thought about it. We were leaking money from a hundred small-to-medium holes, yet we wouldn’t buy something we legitimately wanted because it was never the right time.

Budgeting my irregular bills and responsibilities into sub-accounts, what Mary Hunt recommends in her books “Cheapskate Monthly Money Makeover” and “Debt Proof Living“, changes that dynamic. Instead of worrying how we’ll afford expenses which happen irregularly, we almost happily spend the money we’ve set aside for just those purposes.

Believe me, it is a lot more pleasant this way.

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