Do you budget? Why?

When I was in high school, my mother gave me a clothing allowance. It let her plan her expenses and taught me about budgeting. I did the same with my children. I like budgets because I like planning. I can see what “normal” expenses are, so that I know how much discretionary money I have. Do you budget? Why?

 

When you have a budget, and review that against actual money spent, you learn all sorts of things about your spending habits. You might see things that really weren’t as important as some other things you spent less on. That let’s you adjust future spending so that “needs” are highest priority and you pay for the “wants” in the order of their importance to you, within the confines of what is actually available to spend.

 

 

What about time?

 

Probably somewhere in high school I also learned about budgeting my time. Because some of the assignments were big and had due dates far into the future. So planning milestones for those assignments reduced the last minute rush and associated panic. Again – I’m a big fan, and it has served me well in my careers too.

 

At some point, I went to a self-development workshop where we listed our priorities and then assigned the percent of time we actually spent on each. It goes by many names, but I’m betting you’ve seen different versions of this along the way. The first time you do it, most people are shocked that the hours don’t match up to the priorities very well. For instance, you might list “Family” as your highest priority but see that you actually spend the most time on “Work and Career”.

 

Then you start rationalizing (or at least I did) that some of that work time was to provide things for the family. It can get murky. And maybe you vowed to spend time a little more in alignment with your priorities. You could call that a time budget. And if you track where the hours go, you get to be clear about how much of your time is going to important activities and where (or if) any of that is being wasted. And then you get to adjust – just like a money budget.

 

 

And then there’s the energy…

 

But what about your energy? How do you feel when you’re doing different activities? Things that make you feel good have a higher vibration or frequency than things that make you feel bad.

 

Do you budget yours? It’s another resource that you spend. I’ve started trying to be very intentional about how much time I spend feeling good vs feeling bad. It started out with me just paying attention to what resonated with me and what didn’t. And I began to do more of the former and less of the latter.

 

Just like the other types of budgets, I can choose to not allocate ANY energy toward those lower frequency categories. My goal is to not spend any time in vibrations lower than curiosity. I feel a lot less pressure this way and enjoy myself more, plus I’ve got so many better uses for my energy.

 

 

Does your budget need a little help?

 

Not everyone likes budgets, but if you’re one who does, do you need a little help figuring out if yours are serving you well? Book a free call here and we can explore that.