Messy, But Good
One of my clients recently lamented how "terrible" their first two months of budgeting were. When I asked what made them so terrible, they said they barely got any categories right and, overall, missed the mark by almost $100. Therefore, in their minds, they failed.
Budgeting is messy! After all, life moves fast. We can have the greatest monthly budget in the world, but the moment a month begins, the world starts spinning. Despite best intentions, things rarely go as planned.
The truth is, even a well-executed budget can be messy. A win isn't defined as nailing every single category and finishing the month at exactly zero. Instead, the goal is to simply do the best we can, knowing we're going to whiff some categories, and get the bottom-line number reasonably close to zero. In my personal budget, I rarely get within $150 of our overall target budget. We regularly miss by hundreds of dollars on either side of the ledger. However, over the years, we have averaged finishing within a few dollars of our target. We care more about getting the long-term average right than obsessing over one specific number.
To give you a real-world example, I thought I'd show what my "successful" March budget looked like. In total, we finished $106 overbudget. Further, it's not as if we nailed every category and just whiffed on one or two; we missed all over the place. Here's what some of our misses looked like on a category-by-category basis:
Home Maintenance: +$50
Kids: -$73
Medical: +$99
Subscriptions: -$124
Hosting: +$51
Other Giving: -$103
We whiffed on six categories by more than $50 and missed our overall budget by more than $100, and that's considered a massive win! Even the best budget can be messy.
Moral of the story: Give yourself grace! If we constantly obsess about getting everything exactly right, we're going to feel like trash. We'll constantly believe we're failing, and after enough failures, we'll just give up. Instead, know that perfection isn't the definition of a win. Get as close as you can, know you'll miss on both sides of the ledger, and trust the process. Ultimately, if we do this, we'll find a healthy and sustainable balance between discipline and grace.
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