Hello, Friends!
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about budgets and about why we invest our time into doing a budget. What is our motivation for budgets and how does that change over the years?
I started my first budget when I was about 19 years old. My motivation was basically to save money for college and to have some extra for some “fun”. Growing up, my great-grandpa had talked about his budget but I had never seen how he did it so when I put mine together, I just did it on the fly without any help really. My budget had a category for the following: Rent, Car (gas, oil changes), Food, Miscellaneous and Savings. I was also putting myself through college so I had money that I saved for tuition and books as well. I remember being so excited to make a spreadsheet with different tabs for all of my categories (not much has changed about that 🙂 ). Flash forward a few years and I started dating my now husband. I noticed he was “wasting” a lot of his money by not saving much of it so I sent over my budget so that he could get started saving as well. At this point, another motivation of mine to save was travel. I have always loved traveling so I made another tab on my spreadsheet and anything extra would go into my Travel Fund. After we had been dating a few years, my husband proposed. Since we knew that we would be paying for a wedding, our motivation changed from Travel to Saving for a Wedding (and, if you don’t know, weddings can be expen$ive). We started savings immediately to ensure we had enough to pay for our wedding in cash. Sometimes it was hard! We certainly didn’t travel as much during this time but it was well worth it to start off our marriage without any loans for our wedding day. Right before we were married, I was accepted into a respiratory therapy program. The two-year program is really intense, especially the further along you get so I knew that if we could make it work financially, it would be better for me to make being a full-time student my only job (something I had never done even while getting my Bachelor’s Degree). Luckily, we were able to make this work financially and I firmly believe the only reason was because of our budget! Was it difficult at the time? YEP! We never ate out, and we weren’t able to do a ton of outings with friends if it cost a lot of money (at this point, $20 was a lot of money to us). Again, it was worth it and I was so fortunate to be able to focus solely on my studies during those two years. After graduation, I was able to get a really great job and shortly after that, we bought our first house and had our first child. I still had my good ol’ spreadsheet from college so I changed my Rent tab to Mortgage, added a couple new tabs for Home Repair, 529 Account and Emergency Savings and haven’t looked back since! Even though budgeting isn’t always easy, I really feel like it’s helped us be able to live much more fulfilling lives. I know some people feel like budgets can be restricting but I feel like we have been able to do so much more (travel, have a beautiful wedding, save for a home, etc) because of having a budget. I also think it’s crucial to keep your eye on the prize and remember the reason you have a budget, especially in the moments where it might be difficult and you might want to just give in. Reminding yourself about that ultimate goal might just help you to not make impulsive purchases during a moment of weakness.
Thanks for taking this walk down memory lane with me!
So, why do you budget? And how has that motivation changed over the years?
lifestylesofthefunandfrugal.com 