I’m throwing out my budget

At the McAfee house, there is one New Year’s tradition that dwarfs all others. The new year ushers in budget season.

Kim and I put our first household budget together as soon as we got home from our honeymoon. It was 1992, and the world still ran on paper. We kept every receipt in our wallets until we stuck them on the refrigerator with a magnetic clip. When the pile got too big for the clip, one of us would pull down the pile and assign a spending category to each receipt. Then I would enter all the numbers into a spreadsheet on my giant, desktop computer, and we would have a family meeting on how things were going.

We didn’t have much money back then, and it took teamwork to make ends meet. Surprises were painful. The electric bill would occasionally come in way over our expectations, or we would discover that South Carolina had a very expensive wheel tax. Every dollar that was above the plan had to come out of another category.

It wasn’t just the bills though. We wanted to improve our condition. Kim longed for furniture that looked better than my grungy, college apartment had. I “needed” an ever-expanding list of power tools. We both wanted to run away to the beach for the weekend. Before any actions were taken, we had to make sure we would be able to balance the month.

We had a simple agreement. Once we settled on the budget, either of us could do whatever we wanted, as long as our actions fit within each spending category for that month. If something took more money than a particular category had available, we needed to sit down together and hammer out a plan first.

When we started, I naively thought that following a budget was about making sure to have enough money. In reality, it was much more important.

Kim and I had dreams that vastly exceeded our resources. As a starry-eyed young husband, I wanted to make all of her dreams come true. She felt the same way about me. We spent a lot of time listening to each other’s aspirations and tried to build financial plans to achieve them. I would never have overspent a category without discussing it with her first because it would have violated a trust.

It was years before I understood that budgeting was the foundation for good communication, building faith in each other, and fulfilling our dreams. The numbers and the money were just tools used to accomplish them.