Lessons Learned

It’s time for me to share the toughest budgeting lesson I’ve learned...time to share my cold hard truth. Budgeting is a two-person job!

I will be honest, I’m the one who held budgeting hostage. I was the one who was in charge of the bills, budgeting, reconciling, etc. If things were good, we kept moving along. If things were bad, I tried hard to keep things moving along anyway. I mean, who wants to be the bearer of bad news? Unfortunately, when there’s more month than money, you eventually have to talk about it. Unfortunately, that means the only time we really talked about money/budgeting was when things were bad. Unfortunately, for all these years I equated money talks with bad news. And that’s a hard habit to break!

But, we’re doing it. It took Brandon setting bimonthly budget meetings. We first started meeting offsite for our meetings. This made it feel more like a meeting we couldn’t cancel, and it got us away from the distractions at home. The more meetings we’ve had, the easier they are to keep and they easier they are to focus on what we’re doing.

Truth is, I actually look forward to our meetings now because we are problem solving together before there’s ever even a problem!

I’m also more open to our conversations in general. I realized that for years I’ve avoided some casual conversations with Brandon because I was worried money/budgeting would be brought up. Now that we only talk about money/budget at our scheduled meetings, there’s no pressure. It has literally changed my attitudes and behaviors!

I will admit, it was difficult to get to the point of scheduling the meetings and sticking to it at first. But now that it’s a regular occurrence, now that we’re on the same page in how we spend and how we debt snowball, I can’t imagine any other way!