Money Wise Mom

Budgeting is kinda like working out.

At first it sucks. A lot.

It takes time to build your money muscles.

But if you can keep showing up and putting in the work, eventually, you start to see the gains. And, eventually, you might even kinda, sorta, start to like it.

Starting a budget from scratch is work. Sticking to it is discipline. Fine tuning it is dedication.

Building your money muscles is important. You will depend on them to do the heavy lifting when it’s time to make life choices. From spending to saving to investing, these habits should be cultivated with care and intention.

But you can go to far. Like a body building who can barely turn their head anymore, you can over develop muscles and loose flexibility.

My husband and I may be at risk of over development. We’ve lived and thrived by assigning every dollar a job. We’ve fine tuned and adjusted out spending plan thoughtfully for decades. Generally it’s served us well. We discuss and negotiate changes to our spending plan at our monthly money meeting. We don’t impulse buy. We have mine and yours money. It’s structured. It’s simple. It’s a well oiled machine.

But it’s also a bit rigid. In our early marriage, we were focused on busting our debt. Then we started to focus on building our nest egg. We picked a lifestyle we were comfortable with and that kept our cost of living in line with our values and our goal to retire early.

The thing is, when you give every dollar a job and you want to retire early, you get pretty good at living without. We chose to be a one vehicle family. We chose to limit our holiday spending. If our clothing budget was maxed out, we chose to wait until there was room in the budget again to buy more stuff.

Living this way spills over to social life. We were generous with our time. We’ve always said yes to helping friends and family move. We’ve pitched in on home renos. We’ve helped dig garden beds and erect retaining walls. But we wouldn’t, as a general rule, be dropping by with a Timmies for everyone.

We found ways to work social spending into our budget. We hosted an annual boxing day house party. It was an all day open house and we offered food and drinks, inviting all our friends over to play cards and tabletop games. At our 25^th anniversary, we rented out the back of a pool hall, flew our daughter and her partner in, and hosted a pool tournament, covering everyone’s drink and food for the night. We love that style of generosity.

But smaller acts of generosity, until recently, did not have a place in our budget. The only bucket we had, was Miscellaneous Spending, which is our catch all money for everything from hand cream to rechargeable batteries. This meant we rarely spent money on small acts of kindness, mostly because it just wasn’t something that we thought about intentionally. Our money muscles were too puffed and our wallets just were not flexible in that way.

It’s been on my mind recently. I want to be less transactional and feel freer to perform small acts of kindness. I believe your planned spending is a reflection of your values. Value cars? Your budget will illustrate that. Value clothes? Your budget will prove it. Value eating out? You budget will show that too.

I want to be someone who can fund small acts of kindness and I want my budget to show it.

So, last month, I proposed that we add a Generosity line to our planned spending budget. We agreed to have a modest amount available to allow us to be generous in a spontaneous way. It’s early days, but we’ve both already dipped into our generosity fund on separate occasions, which was great. However, we didn’t spend it to zero, indicating that we have room to stretch ourselves more. We need to build up that money muscle.

We will continue to work at it, and I will keep you posted.

How does generosity show up in your life?