Budgeting using The Force
Several comments, an email, and fellow PF bloggers’ posts have led me to believe that plenty of people control their spending using ‘The Force.’ What I mean is, they don’t have a written budget they follow closely or maybe even a budget at all. The conventional wisdom is that you should use a budget to track spending. These individuals, however, have gone another way.
Our family has used both methods at various times. Right now, we use a written budget and I track our spending and post it on the fridge. The thing about that is, though, we really don’t follow it too closely. Our actual practice much closer to the way we’ve done budgeting in the past using The Force.
Using The Force for budgeting to me means generally feeling your way through your monthly spending. You know how much money is available after fixed expenditures are paid for. You use what’s left over to buy everything else. You get a feel for how much you’ve spent on dining out, groceries, clothes, whatever. If one goes way up, something else gives. This method only works if (1) you an your spouse are in tune and communicate and (2) you have discipline.
I’m considering going back to using The Force at our house. We’ve done it before fairly successfully and really aren’t rigid about our method now. I’d like to get an idea of which method people use and how successfully. Better yet, if there’s a better way than either one of these I’d like to hear it.
May 6th, 2007 at 4:18 am
I’m definitely in the force camp. Once the discipline has been established and the spending is well under control, the next step is how to do that same thing with more efficiency and automation. I definitely understand that folks use a budget, it’s just not for us. We know our income and what the fixed expenses are (savings included as one of those), so then there’s one amount for everything else for the month.
My biggest issue with budgets, and why some people still struggle financially even when following one, is that it’s sometimes pretty difficult to account for all the things that pop up out of nowhere, and the money that would be there to cover those unpredictables is spent unnecessarily because a year earlier it was placed in a category based on an estimated need.
In our case, when my wife tried to design a budget for us, all the bills were accounted for quickly, but then we got to things like “food”, “entertainment”, “clothes”, and “beauty”. How do you budget food? Do you just average previous grocery bills to come up with it? As for entertainment, do you stop going out when you run out of money? If you get busy for a couple of weeks, do you go back and splurge because you have money left in the entertainment category? Do you have rollover minutes? As for a clothes budget, this is probably a gender issue, but I think about 90% of the world realizes that we don’t need new clothing every month. By allotting money in a budget for things that aren’t needs, you end up spending more.
And what gets done with any extra income? I think Force-types would just put it in the pot and continue on while itemizer-types would be inclined to either add it to a category or just consider it as a lump sum for a special treat.