4 Tips to Stop Beating Yourself Up on Your Budget

The only thing you can truly predict about a budget is that it will be wrong.

A budget, in concept, is straight-forward. You develop some standard categories for allocating your money (paying off debt, saving, investing, planning a purchase like a car, and handling routine expenses), and then you track how much you spend to those categories. The financial community lauds the budget as a way to control spending. But there’s a problem with budgets: most of us hate them.

We hate budgets, because we think we’re bad at them. We think that if we are bad with the budget, then perhaps there’s something wrong with us. And when we find ourselves in a tough financial spot, we use the budget as a way to force our behavior. When we fail – because even the best of us makes mistakes – we tell ourselves we’re failures. In fact, most people approach a budget like a diet: a requirement to master a specific plan, rather than meet your personal goals. Failing at a budget is exactly like failing at a diet for most people, particularly women. Rather than promoting personal behaviors that support personal goals and values, budgets and diets tend to follow a prescriptive format that leaves many of us with a sense of failure.

One thing is for sure: the budget will be wrong. You will incorrectly plan, or incorrectly execute a financial budget. A perfect budget won’t guarantee you happiness, love, satisfaction, or security (the typical reasons most of us pursue any goal) anymore than a perfect diet plan. That’s because “perfect” isn’t the goal of a budget. Growth is the goal of a budget: personal and financial.

• If you are tired of seeking “perfect” and feeling like a failure.
• If you are ready to stop beating yourself up over your budget.
• If you want to stop cringing at the thought of tracking financials.

Try these four tips.

Tip 1: Put your budget in its place

Your budget is one tool in financial management. It does not define your financial management, unless you have decided that. It is a mechanism to see if you are able to live according to basic parameters. Many of us start with specific budget categories for house, utilities, groceries, medical care, child care, and find ourselves side-tracked by a lot of other enjoyable interests.

You manage the money. The budget is your tool. It doesn’t tell you that you are good or bad with money, it just looks at how you allocate money according to some categories you, or someone else, came up with. Start treating it that way. You are in charge, not the tool, or a financial guru.

Tip 2: Pay attention to your behavior

The budget isn’t going to change your behavior. You will change your behavior. That’s the problem with the budget for most people. A diet never stopped anyone from enjoying an extra bowl of ice-cream, and a budget won’t keep you from charging something to your credit card.

Ultimately, your goal is always to modify your behavior. Your budget just supports that. Get off the diet budget, and start recognizing that your behavior needs to change for the long-haul. Beating yourself up for bad behavior isn’t the solution. You can make changes with lasting impacts based upon behaviors that make sense for you. I advocate picking three behaviors that you know you can repeat.

If you absolutely love having coffee with friends at work in the morning, keep that in your budget, even though it’s “over-priced.” Find something else to cut, like clothing. If you want to save money and hate cutting out spending, could you rent a room in your house? Treat behaviors as an experiment, and give each experiment a couple opportunities (3-5 “attempts” minimum). After you find something repeatable, add it to the budget if you want.

Tip 3: Pay attention to your values

Your values tell you a lot about what financial choices will help or hinder you in becoming who you want to be. Start with your values, and things start to become clear. Start with your values, and you’ll begin to figure out what some behaviors crop up more than you may like.

If you value independence, you may find yourself rebelling against a budget, and striving to spend however you like on whatever you like. This could be recast as valuing independence, which gives you motivation to get out of debt, or to have a buffer that lets you take extra time off to travel. If you value generosity, you may feel compelled to give every time you see someone in need. But you may want to also recognize that generosity must exist in the right proportion to other values. Perhaps you value security. In that case, you need to allocate some money to an emergency fund, even if that means suspending some monetary giving for a period of time.

Tip 4: Forgive yourself for mistakes

Forgiveness must undergird the financial process, because as you orient yourself more and more to your values and everyday behavior, you will inevitably start to see where you have truly failed to live according to what matters to you. Much of the reason that we beat ourselves up on finances or diet is that we believe we are unworthy of acceptance in the face of our failings.

So you failed. What does that make you? Human. It doesn’t make you unlovable, unforgiveable, or unacceptable.

Financial mistakes are often related to deeper struggles we face in aligning our behaviors with our values. Forgiving ourselves and others provides immense opportunity for freedom and growth. Beating yourself up over the budget won’t bring growth. Forgiving yourself, and gradually aligning your behavior and values will.

The budget is a tool to be kept in its place. But the more powerful tool is forgiveness. Try using it.

For more support on forgiveness, check out my course, Beyond Financial Mistakes. It helps you break free from guilt and start to build a healthy money mindset. You can always message me here.