How Do You Budget for ‘Fun’?
It’s not unusual to get to the stage where you’re trying to overhaul your finances and figure out how to spend less. This naturally leads to you tightening up various areas of your spending – cutting costs wherever possible. This naturally leads you to identify those which can’t be cut – the mandatory bills and payments. With that in mind, how can you begin to justify spending money on anything fun?
In theory, it’s easy to cut this entirely. However, practically, you need to still enjoy your life – meaning that budgeting for fun becomes perhaps more compulsory than you might have expected, though still difficult.
Be Firm
The easiest thing to do is make exceptions in your budget. However, it’s a slippery slope, and once you start to deviate from what you’ve written down, it’s easier to do so again and again, until the budget itself is essentially a worthless document. Therefore, you have to be firm about your spending, even when it comes to something as inherently whimsical as having fun. This might be easier to do than you think. Finding free or low-cost activities can become a challenge, and curbing how much you’re spending on eating food out might help you cook more – beneficial for both your wallet and health.
You might feel as though this struggle hits more when you enjoy going to casinos or playing online pokies, or any other interest that involves spending as a due course. In this case, it’s just about moderation and recognizing the potential impact that could be had if it got out of control while allowing yourself to have fun.
But Fair
On the other end of the spectrum, you don’t want to clamp down on your finances so completely that you don’t have anything to work with at all. This might, after all, just have the same effect and lead to you deviating and removing the value of the budget.
Therefore, you have to be sure to allow yourself enough money here to begin with. That can be difficult when the whole idea is to save, but it’s important to remember that you should expect some trial and error here – that’s okay. If you’re finding that you haven’t given yourself enough to realistically work with, you can go back and tweak it – same as if you’ve given yourself too much and have room to allocate the money elsewhere.
What About Spontaneity?
Fun isn’t always something that is so clearly telegraphed, however. You might find it difficult to reconcile this idea of funds allocated to having fun with the more spontaneous approach that many people embrace. You might find that the best way to resolve this problem is to simply provide yourself with the same budget that you would anyway and use it as an indicator of what you’ve got left. You might be able to afford a coffee with a friend you just ran into, for example, but a sudden weekend trip overseas might not fit into your budget.
