zzzack

You all know the basics of budgeting, right?  You keep track of  your expenses, set up categories, decide how much you can spend in each category and stop spending when you hit that point each month.

It works, but all that keeping track and writing things down and keeping track gets really tedious.  Well, at least it does for me.  I know there are people who actually enjoy the process.  They’re the ones retiring at twelve.  The rest of us have to either just buckle down and do it, or find easier ways to save money.

Now, I highly recommend the initial step in the whole process of keeping track of what you spend over the course of a month.  Every penny.  Every bill that gets paid, every latte, gas tank fill-up, every impulse purchase.  Everything.  This will lead to exclamations of “I spent HOW MUCH  on coffee??!!?”  And make implementing step 2 a whole lot easier.  You don’t have to do this every month, just once in awhile, to give you an idea of how you’re doing.

The method I’ve come up with to keep my spending under control and give me the freedom to do the things I really want, is what I’ll call the Cut and Forget method of budgeting.  I just find entire categories of spending and cut them out of the budget.  Just, that’s it, no more of this.

And then I don’t even have to think about it again.

I think the very first category I cut out, many years ago was jewelry.  I know, easy, right?  How many times a year do you spend money on that?  But some people do.  And if I’d let myself get in the habit of buying those pretty trinkets, there’s probably at least one trip to France I wouldn’t be remembering fondly now.

I’ve taken out more regular and sometimes more challenging categories over the years:  processed foods, CDs, DVDs, magazines.

Once you’ve decided on a category, you don’t really have to think about it again, you just don’t buy that item any more.

This has a lovely spillover effect, too.  By deciding not to buy DVDs, we haven’t had to buy a DVD player (well, we wouldn’t have anyway, they work quite nicely on the laptop, when we borrow them from the library) and we haven’t had to figure out where to store them, possibly necessitating the purchase of another piece of furniture.

And I haven’t had to try to keep up with really annoying paperwork, which I hate.

Of course, it’s important to remember to actually put the money you’re saving by not spending in these categories into a savings account or down on your debt or into the vacation fund.  But you can set it up so it happens automatically and you don’t need to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

I really like having money available for the things that are important to me.  I just don’t see the need to spend a lot of time and effort tracking it all.

Please let me know any budget hacks you’ve come up with.