Conquering Finances: Who Owns Your Money?

So to continue our thoughts on finance and how to start getting our budgets in shape. Last week I talked a bit about figuring out if something is a need or a want. This week I want to talk about something that was probably one of the hardest things for me when I started really figuring out what was going on with my budget - being able to see the big picture of who really owned my money.

For most of my life I considered myself financially savvy as long as I could keep my checkbook balanced. (and yes there were times that I made a few oopses in that department and had to pay for it - literally and figuratively). I had fallen into a trap taught from the 3rd grade when we learned to fill out the checkbook register that as long as my ones and zeros were in the right place and I never went into the negative that all was well.

That’s probably all well and good for a 3rd grader, their spending and responsibilities really aren't that complicated and it's a good place for kids to start. As we become adults though our burdens change a bit. It’s no longer deciding if we have the $10 to buy the shirt we see in the department store or not. We now have responsibilities like credit cards, mortgage payments, electric bills, etc. that are going to happen every month pretty much whether we want them to or not.

To put it simply - we don’t really own a large portion of our money. Most of our money is promised to other people before it ever lands in our checking accounts. We have to change the way that we shop and think and realize that before we can make ends meet. Even if our checkbook says we have $1,000 when we go to look at that $10 shirt we still can not just buy it. This is where having a budget really comes in handy because all of those expenses can be planned for and divided out so we know what we have left to be able to spend on that shirt regardless of what the checkbook may say.

If we don’t budget out, or don’t stick to our budget, we often find ourselves surprised by things that really shouldn’t be surprising. T-shirts, lunches out, and other hits on our bank accounts here and there seem like such small and insignificant things when we look at the big total number of what may be available to us but then when it comes time to pay all those people that we owe we ask ourselves where all the money went. At least that’s my experience.

We can have a lot more peace of mind when we expect and plan for those things from the very beginning instead of when we get the bill in the mail. Then we can buy that shirt without having to worry about if we’ll have enough at the end of the month to make ends meet.