Living Without a Budget

Thank you for the warm reception to my debt story a few weeks ago. If you haven’t already, go give it a read and share your own journey with me. I love reading your stories and I hope you know that I see you.

The biggest lesson my husband and I learned from our journey out of debt is that no matter what your financial situation, you have to have a plan. In the absence of a plan, hijinks ensue.

We’ve had two distinct seasons without a plan for our money, and both of them led us to trouble. Today I’ll tell you about the first.

During my pregnancy with our daughter, I’d planned and budgeted for a 6-week maternity leave. But after she was born I changed my mind and took 16 weeks instead. Most of those weeks were unpaid, meaning for a short time we did not have more than half our income.

I vividly recall one sleep-deprived night two weeks after my baby girl was born. She was sleeping like an angel in her bassinet beside me, and I was wide awake staring at her. Watching her sweet little sleeping face I was smacked with the realization that it was only four short weeks before she’d begin daycare, and I’d lose so much precious time with her. Time I’d never get back. I couldn’t bear it.

I had to figure out a way to have more these precious days of her tiny life with her.

I got up and went to our living room, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and began scrawling numbers on a piece of paper, trying desperately to make a single-income budget work so I could stay home a bit longer. I crumpled up sheet after sheet and ended the night with my head in my hands, defeated, exhausted, and heartbroken.

The next morning, I had crossed over from defeated to desperate. I snatched a fresh sheet of paper out of the printer tray and laid out the most unrealistic budget anyone possibly could. “Food for 5 people and two dogs? Yeah we could do that with $100 a month…” and so on…

It was complete fiction.

I knew my numbers were unrealistic. But my emotions had taken over. Soon thoughts began pouring into my head that I couldn’t quiet. “It is temporary…” “Just a short term sacrifice...” “We can figure it out...”

With these thoughts as my new soundtrack, I convinced myself and my husband that we could make it work.

You know how this ends. We couldn’t.

I never even looked at that fictional budget again. So you know we didn’t attempt to follow the plan. “We can figure it out” was the chorus of the season.

We can figure it out. That’s a dangerous phrase when it’s not backed by any real action. In this case, I’d done the figuring already. And the figures didn’t figure. At that point, the plan was not a plan, it was hope.

On top of that, I had some habits in place that I neglected to change to match the season.

Out of habit, I charged groceries and supplies on my credit card. Before I’d pay it off every month like clockwork, so why wouldn’t this be any different? But one income was different.

By the second month of one income there wasn’t enough in checking to cover the full balance. A few savings transfers later and the savings didn’t cover the balance anymore either. So then I paid the minimum.

And when it got hard to look at how much higher the debt was than the cash, I just… stopped looking. Even after going back to work, I didn’t look. I just kept paying the minimums, hoping to catch up.

A few months later, when I finally pulled my head out of the sand, the credit card balance was $12,000.

I’d hoped to figure it out. But I hadn’t.

Hope, as it turns out, is not a strategy. Hope is not a plan.

We did eventually figure it out. And we spent the next couple of months on a shoe string budget, paying off that credit card… paying for the past.

The psychology behind this season still fascinates me to this day. When I look back on this time I am both disappointed and sympathetic to my younger self. I wanted so desperately to devote some extra undivided time to my kids that I let logic fall away in favor of hope and emotion. In many ways I’m thankful that I took that time to stay home longer. But I’m filled with regret that I didn’t plan my leave better and that I didn’t partner with my husband on an effective plan from the start. Instead I burdened him after I’d gotten what I longed for.

Not having a plan will always show.

So if you’ve done something like this — made illogical assumptions or opted to just “figure it out” while you’re in it and it resulted in a financial setback, you’re not alone. Know that I’m rooting for you. You can get out of it, but you’ve got to pull that head out of the sand and make a plan.

There was a different time in our marriage that we didn’t work our plan… It was after we’d paid off our debt. Come back next week to read the story.