We don’t seem to be getting a handle on this budget thing.
A lot of that is because my family is not on board with it yet. A lot of that is because I haven’t pushed it hard enough, and still a lot of that is because we have had some really weird money expenditures and influxes in the last two months. The crazy money months that we have had is somewhat typical to how we live our life. For this reason, we have never really had an interest or seemingly a necessity, to pursue a budget for our family.
When we ran short on money, crazy money appeared. If we had extra money, crazy bills would pop up. We have lived in this unbalanced balance for most of our lives.
This cycle gets crazier as you begin to add children into the mix. Once the children get old enough to have their own expenditures like activities, school clothes, sports equipment, etc., the crazy money to debt ratio becomes that much more exciting. Not necessarily in a good way. The swing of having crazy money at one moment to crazy debt at another moment becomes a little more wild.
Kind of like this sine wave
The green line is when you are single. One income and just strolling through life at a pace that is primarily dictated by your cash reserves.
The black line is when you are married. Double the income, triple the bills. So the sine wave gets just a little more nuts and with the extra income, the waves get more frequent.
Now the red line. The red line is once you have kids. It doesn’t really matter how many, but it does matter a little about how old they are. Lets just say, for sake of argument, that they are 17 and 14. You will notice that the wave is not only far more spastic than the green or black, but that it also spends much more time below the surface. Gasping for air.
While of course I am a big fan of crazy money, it is not even close to being dependable. You never know if it will come or certainly when it will come. Somehow though, it always came. Maybe it wasn’t enough to match the bills that were going out, but it would usually be enough to take the stress out of the situation. I can’t explain it.
Think Happy Thoughts….
The instances that you receive crazy money are typically just by chance. I mean, you can hope for it, you can pray for it, you can wish for it to appear, but the appearance of crazy money is nothing more than happenstance and timing. Essentially, you have no control. Because if you did, it wouldn’t be crazy money now, would it?
What I can explain is that crazy money is probably the one main reason why all these years that Dee and I have been together, that we never felt that we needed a budget. Crazy money.
Taming the craziness
Even if we had a budget, how can you account for crazy money? Well, I have just figured it out. I have written into my budget tracker a “Crazy Money” column. This column is separate from the income, and tax return, and Ebay columns. It sits down the bottom of the month and waits. It waits for that influx of crazy money.
The Crazy Money column was created out of desperation. I needed a budget. I just could not see how I could continue fixing our finances without the stability that a budget affords you. Even when that sine wave above gets all turbulent and wild, the budget is your compass. I have posted about this before and you can read up on it some more HERE. But suffice it to say, that you need a budget to tame the sine wave, if not to control it, to at least give it some predictability.
Crazy Money and all……
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