For the month of May, I decided to join the 30-Day Budget Dare and put a strict budget in place to see if we could follow it. We gathered some data from the past few months and estimated what our costs might be for this month. After an hour of playing with the numbers to make sure it all balanced, our budget was finally built.
Fast forward two weeks (and change) to today and it’s already clear that we messed up. Today is the 18th and we’ve already exceeded our budget in two categories: Groceries and household expenses.
There’s two easy ways to break your budget: Little unplanned purchases and poor estimation. One, you can control within the month, and the other you have less control over.
For example, our household expense column looks like this: $10.50, $2.94, $24.03, $10.86, $6.53, $10.54. Little purchases here and there have pushed us 30% over budget in just half of a month. Most of these things we didn’t need to spend money on right away and when we purchased it, we didn’t believe it would hurt our budget. Because we were careless with the spending, we’ve met our first failure.
For groceries, we simply failed to properly plan for this month’s expenses. Before setting the grocery budget, we should have examined the pantry and freezer. When we estimated our expense for this month, we took the last four months into consideration. Unfortunately, the number was low because we pulled heavily from our freezer and pantry and neglected to restock. We budgeted $200 based on the first part of this year, but we’ve already spent $240 and have at least one more grocery trip before the end of the month.
I’m not surprised that we already “achieved” our first failure so short into the experiment, but I’m not disappointed. Building a budget is a learning experience and one that you perfect over many months. We will take what we learned from this month and apply it in the coming months. We will be more careful with our spending and build more “wiggle room” into our spending categories in the future.
Photo by: householdriot
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I have done both of those things! Groceries and Home Improvement/Household are my two hardest categories. Sometimes I do so well in them, but when I go over – I go way over. Sometimes it is because of the things you mention here, sometimes an emergency pops up – having to take food to someone in need, a quick home repair. The trick it to keep with it, it is easy to let these “failures” derail a good plan. That’s why I like resetting my budget every month so I start with a clean slate!
I am usually in the “underestimating expenses” category. Couple it with a few unexpected expenses or a day of overspending and the budget is shot!
In fact we just went through this cycle this weekend. Overshot our bi-weekly budget by $100. Oops! No more spending for the next 10 days!
Congratulations on not allowing one misstep derail you.