People get pretty nervous when they hear the word budget. It sounds a lot like some scary weapon your spouse brandishes at you to prevent you from having any fun. At best, a budget sounds like a lot of stress.
In reality, I believe a budget can be remarkably stress relieving. At least most of the time.
A budget is really just a plan. By spending your money on paper before the month even begins, you’re making sure that when the time comes for those bills to be paid and for real money to start disappearing from your checking account, it’s not any more than you were already expecting. And if things are working correctly, that same amount of money will subsequently be replaced by your income. When all is said and done at the end of the month, you’re right back where you started (and hopefully a bit ahead with money set aside for savings). That’s called a balanced budget.
Unfortunately here in the Bayer household, a balanced budget has been a bit hard to come by as of late. I’ll tell you, working your finances is a lot more fun when you’re happily distributing your plentiful income into various spending categories. But how many people are really living like that, regardless of what you make? More likely, you’re looking at a deficit and trying to figure out if there’s anything else to cut that you didn’t already cut last month. And let’s face it, that’s not nearly as enjoyable. Throw on top of that the fact that I’m so miserly that I would stress about my finances if I was a quadrillionaire, and well, yeah, you get the idea.
I hate writing blog posts that are filled with complaining (and you probably don’t like reading them), but let’s be honest here. That is the scent of cantankerousness that you smell in the air. Dri and I had a bit of a pity party tonight as we cut down our budget yet again. I think any time you have to cut spending there’s going to be some complaining involved. Just look how much whining all of our politicians have been doing lately! And the spending cuts they’ve proposed haven’t even put a dent in their (more like our collective) deficit. I suppose our family could follow their example, but that’s just postponing your problems, not eliminating them. And usually when those problems resurface, they’re even bigger and badder than before.
So cut we did. Again. And then whine we did. Again. But then we stepped back and really examined our situation. And if I just keep being honest here…I felt a little ashamed at my self-centeredness.
We’ve been remarkably blessed by God to have been provided everything we could possibly need and then some. We don’t even always know how it happens, but it does. Every setback seems to be accompanied by blessing, whether it’s extra insurance coverage from one side of the family that helped pay for Dri and Avelea’s hospital bills, to the other side of the family that donated a vehicle to us out of nowhere. Other times it’s more subtle, like the math on our income/expenses not quite working out. And I mean that in a good way. An incredibly wonderful way. Like a, “how is our checking account doing that?” kind of a thing.
God’s faithfulness to my growing family never ceases to amaze me, though you’d think that at some point it would. It’d probably make more sense for me to be amazed at my own faithlessness. Time and time again, God has proven Himself to be far bigger than our problems, despite the fact that He obviously has nothing to prove. Hopefully someday I’ll really get that through my head, and then I can start learning to have a little bit of trust.