What Budgets and Confession Have in Common

I have a confession to make:  while I've been the one primarily responsible for managing our finances since we got married, I'd never, until this last week, sat down and done a budget.

To some this will come as a huge shock, and others will probably think to themselves, "So what?  We don't, either, and we're fine."

I'm here to tell you today that it is actually worth it to do one, annoying and depressing as it may seem at the time.

Here's the thing.  For the first couple of years of our married life, I fooled myself into thinking I was "budgeting" adequately, because I was writing down every major bill we had to pay each month, and making sure we had enough money in the account to cover it.   Money came in, money went back out, and I told myself that I was allotting "about this much" for groceries, and "about that much" for clothing, and that since ends seemed to meet, we were doing OK.  The truth was, we were doing just fine.  We were two adults with okay paying jobs, living in an apartment, and sharing a single vehicle (that was paid off).  Our only major expense was my husband's student loans, and on a consolidated plan, we only owed about $250 a month.  Not too big a deal.

But then, time went on, and life happened.  We got pregnant, had a beautiful daughter, and I started working part time, willingly dropping half of my income to do so.  At the same time, my husband got a promotion that almost, but not quite, equaled what we were dropping.  We bought a second car, and embraced a car payment.  And at the end of that year, things were still OK.  We'd been able to buy what baby stuff we really needed, were given a lot besides, and happily embraced our newfound ability to claim good tax credits.  And still, my "budgeting" was just a list of major bills, tacked up on our fridge.

Then 2010 happened.  The year started off bright, and we even had enough extra cash in January to buy a (inexpensive) new couch.  Good thing we lived it up then, because once March rolled around, it all began to fall apart.  An unforeseen dental emergency radically bit into our savings account, and the dental insurance we were paying for out of pocket (my husband's job doesn't provide dental) didn't cover any of it, because we hadn't had the policy for a year yet.  I had a vague sense that possibly we should have been better prepared for such a contingency, but still, I didn't really change anything.

Then LW started having teeth problems in July (it was a year of tooth woes, let me tell you!).  And the chain of unfortunate events didn't stop there.  Four separate sets of family members or friends got married over the summer, and we were (happily, joyfully, and expensively) in the bridal party of half those weddings.  Both cars needed substantial brake repairs at the same time, the Christmas gift buying season... the list goes on and on of "things we didn't plan ahead for."  I tried to tackle the problem over the summer with a sudden burst of frugality, but still I didn't actually sit down and really look at the numbers.

January rolled around again, and I began to realize that (despite doing the Christmas shopping early, and being frugal in our expenditures), ends really just weren't meeting month after month.  We should have at least a couple hundred extra dollars each month, according to my "master bill list" - so where was it all going?

One of my big themes for this year has been developing a system for things, and getting more organized in my approach to life (work, cleaning, how we care for our daughter, etc). We've also been setting some real, tangible goals (such as saving X amount towards a house down payment, and towards being able to take a real vacation at some time in the future) and so it just seemed natural to perhaps begin budgeting more intentionally.  I thought that maybe if we tracked our spending for a month or two, we could get a feel for where we could make some improvements, and maybe it would help us to begin to make real progress towards our goals, instead of feeling like we were continually back-sliding.

(I know, I know, at this point you may be asking when I'm going to stop telling a tale of woe, and explain what this has to do with the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  But be patient.  I am going somewhere with all of this, somewhere more than just "why everyone should have a budget").

Last week, I sat down, with the help of some nifty free software (Buddi) and set up a budget for us.  I started with what I already knew: what comes in each month, and what was going out for major bills.  Then I began filling in the categories of things I knew we needed each year, but hadn't included (somehow my mind must have been assuming that some sort of "magic money from the sky" would materialize to cover these): things like a monthly allowance for clothing, a monthly car repair fund, monthly saving towards the gifts we'll give over the course of a year.  I also included things like a little bit (which, as I tinkered with the numbers to make income and outgoing equal each other, grew smaller and smaller) of free cash for us both to do what we would in a month (perhaps coffee, or a new book).

The end result was depressing, because it turned out we didn't have anywhere near the amount of disposable income that I thought we did.  Actually, our "disposable" income is essentially zilch.  I had to really trim some things in a major manner to get it to balance at all, and it is not fun to have to tell yourself that you literally don't have the money to contribute to a category the way you thought you did, when you are used to believing that you had quite a bit of wiggle room in your "budget".

But - it was also an uplifting exercise, because finally, I could see the actual state of things.  I knew how bad things were, but also how bad they weren't - that, while we're going to have to pinch pennies to accomplish our goals, we aren't in the red, and our budget (unlike a lot of corporate and governmental budgets these days!) isn't entirely unbalanceable.  We can choose to live within our means, and now we have really good guidelines on what those are.  If we can stick to it, we'll also have the peace that comes from knowing that we're actually putting aside money towards some (if, unfortunately, not all) of the financial curve balls that will doubtless continue to come our way.  And we'll be able to make some slow progress, hopefully, towards things we really want, by choosing to be more intentional, more knowledgeable, in our financial management.

Anyway.  I tell you all of this primarily to provide the backdrop to a revelation I had in the process: that budgeting is a lot like examining one's conscience, when done thoroughly and in depth.  On the one hand, both are uncomfortable, somewhat depressing, activities.  You have to face some ugly truths about the state of your character (and bank account).  A lot of shortcomings come to light, and it's not fun to see exactly how short you may be falling of where you thought you were.  But on the other hand, honestly facing where you are and who you are brings a real sense of hope, as well.  You can toss aside the vague sense of guilt ("I know I don't measure up to what I should be, although I'm not really sure exactly where or how that is"), and its corollary in banking, the vague sense that ends aren't meeting, and replace both with an actual list of things that need to change.

Possibly why this revelation struck me so strongly is that, at the same time as I realized our financial plight, I was also dealing with a health problem that was really getting me down.  I'm generally pretty much a hypochondriac anyway, and I didn't know what was causing the problem, or what the diagnosis was going to be.  For some reason, it made me really realize my mortality in a new way, and one day the thought struck home, "if I die this year, what I've done for God will have been fallen so short of the mark."  Just like my financial planning (or lack thereof), my spiritual planning has been lackadaisical.  I do what seems necessary, and check off the list of big "bills," if you will - go to Mass on Sunday, check.  Fast on fast days, check.  Go to Confession occasionally, check.  Try to be a good mom, wife, friend, daughter, sibling, sibling-in-law, check, when I'm in the mood, and everything is going right, and my hormones/the weather/what I had for lunch allow, which is, if I'm generous, maybe 1/4 of the time.  But I know I haven't really been storing up treasures, not like I should be.  I haven't been letting God's grace do radical things in my character.  If you read back through everything I just said about money and budgets, planning and not planning, and insert the ideas of grace, good works, storing up treasures, sinning, falling short of the mark, etc, my spiritual state becomes just as clear as our financial one: I've been just as lazy and intentionally ignorant in caring for the growth of my own soul as in my stewardship of our bank account.  And this year, even more than I want our financial situation to change, I want to (or at least I want to want to, if that counts as the same thing) make spiritual strides in the right direction.  I want to become purposeful and knowledgeable, in the sense of knowing myself (especially in so far as that means knowing myself in need of God's grace and help!), in my spiritual life.

Of course, it's easier in some ways to live in the cloud of unknowing.  It's a position that doesn't demand change, or sacrifice, or hard work.  But it's also a place where you can get stuck, and stop moving towards where you really want to be.  In the short term, I'm hoping a budget can help us get into a house, a place that will be a temporal, though temporary, home.  In the long term, I know that regularly sifting through my own failings, going to confession, and putting what I promise to change into practice, will, with God's grace and mercy, bring me to the place I really want to be: my forever home, Heaven, with Him.

Retreats, Simplicity, and Ordinary Life

We're dead-smack in the middle of winter.  The Northeast just got clobbered with a boatload of the white stuff.  Cabin fever is really setting in, since I haven't stepped foot outside our house since Monday morning, and that was just to go grocery shopping.  Consequently, I have this almost overwhelming desire (maybe even need?) to jet off somewhere, preferably tropical, and go on a retreat!  Unfortunately, it's totally not practical at the moment for a number of reasons... so instead I'm thinking and writing about bringing the key parts of a retreat into my day to day, ordinary life.  See my guest post over at Catholic Mothers Online today - Bringing Retreat Simplicity into Ordinary Life. 

Hopefully more real posts to come here at some point soon.  Balancing work and toddler has suddenly gotten very difficult, and I haven't had a lot, or any, time to write!