The Good Budget Meeting

 There’s no better way to get control of your finances than creating and sticking to a budget. 

Sounds easy enough, right? In this three-part blog series, we will share with you the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to how we started having good budget meetings, how we actually create our budget using budgeting tools, and ways we were able to reduce spending to have more money to put towards our student loan debt. 

So first things first, we had to learn to talk to each other about money…and not just when we would run out of it!

I don’t know about you, but it turns out, Brandon and I had very different viewpoints when it came to how we should budget our money. Turns out, we also had very different viewpoints when it came to how we should pay off debt. If there was one viewpoint we did share in common, it was that we wanted to pay off those student loans. Turns out, the only way to do that was to find a way to face these differences and to come up with a plan together!

We finally got to the point where we started to schedule budget meetings. Now first, let me tell you what it’s not (and I know this because we have tried and can tell you, it doesn’t really work).

A good budget meeting is NOT a budget report. It is not one person crunching the numbers, rattling off where money is and is not, and then where it should and should not go.

A good budget meeting is also NOT a rehashing of what is already spent. If the money is spent, it is spent and it is not coming back. No sense in spending all your time trying to figure out where it went.

So, what is it and how do you start?

First, schedule it. Decide when and where and stick to it.

Get your budget meeting on the calendar just like you would any other commitment you are serious about attending. I had to be honest with Brandon and tell him that talking about money makes me cringe, so if we were going to meet about it, he would have to see to it that we keep the commitment. We also decided to meet offsite, meaning not at our house. We have five kids and it is pretty much impossible to finish a sentence without some kind of interruption. If our kids were very young, maybe we could have planned it for after bedtime. But since our kids are older, we knew it was best to just leave home for a couple of hours. 

Next, decide how you are going to plan and track your budget. 

I prefer the app EveryDollar and can easily keep up with it on my phone for day-to-day spending. Brandon likes to track debt payoff and keeps up with that on an Excel spreadsheet he created. We are learning that, together, we make a pretty good team!

Finally, you gotta talk numbers. 

For us, in the beginning, it was the worst. It was hard to see and talk about the number of dollars coming in, the number of dollars going out, and the number of dollars needed to pay off the student loans. It was daunting and discouraging. We were both uneasy and uncomfortable. 

But for the first time, we were both present, we were both attentive, and we both had the time to hash through it and come up with a plan.

At our very first good budget meeting, we took almost all of what we had in savings and paid it towards a credit card we had been using for “emergencies” and the unexpected. We paid it, right then and there. We then paid the rest of what we had available towards our smallest student loan. Making these larger than usual payments was something we had only talked about in the past. Because before we would talk about a budget, I would give my usual report, he would say we should take savings and put it towards a loan, I would agree, and I would never follow through. Because typically, I handled the money myself, I knew something unexpected would happen, and I always felt better having that money for “just in case.” But right then and there we broke that habit, we paid towards the debt, and anything that suddenly came up after that, we had to talk about and make a plan, together.

And one other thing we recommend, sit on the same side of the table when talking about your money and budget. We didn’t do this at first, and I will tell you, you could feel the tension coming across the table. We now sit side-by-side, arm-to-arm, and there is no tension, just two people coming up with a plan and sticking to it.

Unfortunately, the world is not going to stop turning just because you now have a budget. In fact, it will feel like it is out to get you at times. For that, you absolutely should have money for “just in case.” We follow what is taught in Financial Peace University and that is to have a $1000 emergency fund. I can assure you, as soon as you have that amount of money in that fund, something requiring that amount of money will come up and you will have to use it. It has happened to us every single time. 

This last time it was a major car repair. As luck would have it, we paid all our saved up money towards the loan, we were on track to pay off the next one, and then our 14-year-old paid-off car needed a major repair.  But instead of me dealing with this alone, we talked about it, we prayed about it, and we talked some more. We agreed to make the repair and to finish paying off the next student loan the next month. 

And we did.