BUDGETING

I read a book titled ‘More Money Now’. It is a secular book but it has nuggets of truth to learn from. One of my takeaways was about budgeting. The author said that most millionaires don’t keep a budget. Because budgeting will never make you rich. Budgeting focuses on tactic without understanding that good personal finance is 80% mindset and behaviour, 20% tactic. It was when she stopped using a budget that she discovered a better way to manage her money that she started to see real change.

A budget may give us instant benefit but this creates a false sense of security that prevents us from looking at the reasons why we are overspending in the first place. To break out of this the first thing we need to do is acknowledge that a budget limits our control. You need to learn what is important to you and to think critically about what you are spending and why. But society doesn’t want us thinking, it wants us following a set of rules and norms. 

 

She sought to understand more about why she did the things and how she could empower herself to do the things necessary to bring her closer to her goals. To know where her thoughts about money came from, how those shaped her life and how to rewrite them. To create a simple way to manage her money that didn’t involve shame, blame, restriction or anxiety. Create new money rules to run her life that would provide the opposite effect of budgeting.

 

She needed to learn how to seek happiness in what she bought and stop buying stuff that didn’t satisfy. Instead of trying to conform to some predetermined plan that didn’t work, she had to rewrite the rules and make them work for her. Finally she was ready to truly learn about saving, investing and growing her money without sacrificing her happiness to get there. She talked about money gauge, which is simply the amount of money that feels normal and natural to you. Your comfort zone with money. 

 

I just wanted to process what she said at this point. Now budgeting is my area of strength. It was a tool that served me well all those years. It helped me to better track my household finances. At least I knew where the money was coming from and where it was going. I had a good grasp on our cash flow and our savings level. I don’t have a savings goal though. I only used the tool to track my spending, to make sure that we are not overspending. 

 

I also don’t apportion our savings into various categories because I felt it was too restrictive. And I don’t take note of every single thing we spent on. Just the baseline items like dining, groceries, others etc. Even so I felt it was getting a little onerous recently. Yet I must say that budgeting served me very well. I am proud of my household budget. It also gave me a sense of security to see that our bank accounts are growing. It was like a sacred cow to me. 

 

Unlike the author, I actually enjoyed budgeting. I enjoyed tracking where our money went to. It worked very well for me in the past few years. But somehow lately I sensed God telling me that my budget could be limiting me. It started in Jun 2023, when I realised our spending had been higher in the last few months and I felt that we should tighten our belts. I didn’t like this feeling of spending out of control. I was also cautious of lifestyle creep. But no, we didn’t spend excessively. 

 

It could be due to inflation and higher cost of living that our household expenses went up. This also caused some anxiety because I began to wonder if inflation would put a strain on our savings in future. Which was why I became more careful with our spending. To a point that it was limiting me. It really does limit my control of my finances. Not only that, it was focusing me on the demand side, trying to cut down costs when God is enlarging my vision regarding the supply. 

 

So then, the poverty mentality within me surfaced. I am the kind of person who enjoys saving and at times I will try not to spend if I can go without something. I know that spending money makes most people happy but not me. Saving money makes me happy. I knew I was going overboard when I had nothing to save up for but yet I was still saving. I don’t know what I am saving up for. Definitely not retirement. It could be to build the buffer to pay our home loan mortgage in cash.

 

When this poverty mindset came up again, I realised God was trying to get a message across to me. The mindset has got to do with everything: personal finance and savings. Firstly where was my security about money? Is it in my ability to control my budget well or is my trust in God to provide? Secondly is this budgeting empowering me or limiting me in this new season? It might have worked well in the last season but it could be old wineskin that limits my potential in this new season. 

 

The Lord was also teaching me about saving, investing and growing my money without sacrificing my happiness to get there. So while I began to sense less ‘life’ or enjoyment when doing budgeting, I sense more ‘life’ when God was teaching me how to increase our passive income. I wasn’t looking forward to tracking our expenses every month. In fact I would get stressed and cringe when I realised it was more than previous months. Then I would avoid activities that require us to spend money. It became too restrictive. 

 

So yes in the new season I believe God wants me to spend more time on increasing our income. Be it through doing some business or other forms of investment. Maybe less on reducing our expenses. Because we are already very lean. A lot of our expenses could not be cut down further like taxes, utilities, mobile bills, tithing, parents’ allowance, insurance, maintenance etc. We already spent lesser on petrol and parking this year because we don’t drive as often.