Budget Hack: Budget Reset

Video Transcript

We're all looking for ways to make our budgets work better for us. Here's a quick budget hack to help you stick to your budget, and I think I'll call this one a budget reset.

Sometimes we can treat our budgets as these documents that are just set in stone and once they're created, they can't be changed. But that's the exact opposite of what a budget is. Budgets are meant to just give us a frame work to responsibly handle our money and we do that using the information we have available at the time, but I don't know if you knew this, but we are extremely bad at predicting the future and it's inevitable that something will either go wrong or at the very least go in a way that we didn't plan for. So that is why I recommend doing a budget reset every two weeks.

Here's how you do this. I want you to grab your computer or phone, your tablet, whatever you use to look at your budget, and I want you to find a comfortable place to sit. Now, take a look at the budget you originally prepared, and compare that to how you’re spending has gone so far this month.

If after just two weeks you see that your spending really isn't matching how you planned, don't just take your budget and throw it in the trash, I want  you to instead prepare a budget for the remaining two weeks of the month, and you're going to do this using the money that you have left. Now, this may mean that you may have to cut somethings from your budget that you'd originally planned for, but I think it's better to cut now and remove those items then to risk overspending or having to pull out a credit card or take money from your savings to make it to the end of the month.