The Pain of Budgeting

We start our series off with everyone's favorite financial topic: Budgeting. You either love it or hate it!

Budgeting. When you hear that word, what comes to mind? Before we go on, grab a pencil and some paper or your favorite note-taking app and jot some thoughts down.

For me, I can think of a few things:

• something I can never keep up with

• restriction

• not enough to go around

• overwhelming

• guilt

• it's hopeless

My budgeting Pain story

Did you read my story on the About page yet? If so, maybe you already know that I learned a lot from others about what to do or not to do. But I still didn't quite get everything.

I knew budgets were a good thing. Right? Families used them. Governments used them. Businesses used them. Surely budgeting must be something I should do too!

So I got out a calendar and a spreadsheet. I laid out the year and forecast what my expenses looked like. Since I can be detail oriented sometimes, they looked very neat and tidy.

Not so painful so far. Unless you're a free spirit and don't like neat and tidy.

Then I started tracking my expenses and recording them in the spreadsheet. Everything was going great! I was budgeting!

For about two weeks... and then...

I forgot to record something one day. And then I forgot to record something else another day.

And then I forgot to record so many things that I no longer had any idea what I had spent and how it compared to my budget. It was still only the first month. Talk about pain!

So what happened?

When the second month rolled around I tried again...but it didn't last either. After the third or fourth month of this, I was so overwhelmed I just gave up.

"A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well as afterward." – Unknown

What's your budgeting Pain story?

If you have tried budgeting and failed we welcome you to briefly share your story in the comments below (note: site registration required to post comments). It helps to know we are not alone in our pain, not alone in our failures, not alone in our fears, not alone in our losses.

Does this mean I don't need to budget anymore?

Maybe. Everyone's situation is different. I still strongly recommend money management. I still strongly discourage spending more than you make. If budgeting works for you, more power to you my friend!

All I know is that what I thought of as budgeting did not work for me. So what did work? You'll have to come back next time to find out! Ok, ok, I'll give you a hint: the title is "The Pleasure of Spending Plans."

No more pain, please!

Some things in life are just painful, but they can often have benefit. Take training for example. No athlete has ever won the Super Bowl or World Cup without putting an unthinkable about of long, hard, painful hours training to be great.

I won't lie to you: sometimes getting our finances in order is painful. But the payoff is worth it. In more ways than one.

That being said, did you ever have a role model tell you to "work smarter, not harder"? There's good pain, and then there's unnecessary pain.

I hope sharing some of what I've learned along the way can help you embrace the good pain together with your team while avoiding the unnecessary pain.

Contact us today to schedule your free consultation to find out if Yak Country Financial Coaching is a good fit for your personal financial team. We can't do it alone!

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