How Much Is Too Much?
The other day I was reading an article for some research on one of my other blogs and it talked about how much is too much in our everyday lives. It was talking about how to recognize when you are doing to much in your everyday life. There were some principles that were suggested for attaining a calmer, less stressful life . Some of these principles are basic to living a frugal lifestyle.
1. Establish boundaries.
We have boundaries set in all areas of our life. The speed limit is a boundary. The article I was reading mentioned the lines on the highway. They are boundaries that keep us in line. You go too far one way you may fall off the side of the highway. You go too far the other way and you might run into a car or truck.
Picture by Chad Johnson at Flickr.com
Boundaries are necessary when choosing to live a frugal lifestyle. Setting a budget and sticking to it is establishing boundaries. It’s setting limits in both your spending and saving. Following the budget is like staying in your lane on the highway. It keeps you from spending mishaps.
2. Notice warning signs.
When you’ve established your boundaries in your budget and you monitor your spending habits, you will start noticing the warning signs of overspending in certain areas.
Here’s an example.
You might have a love of shopping the sales. You have the extra cash left after paying the bills. So you go on a shopping spree. You save the receipts in case you need to return something and also for an accurate total to put in the budget. You are trying to stick to the budget and you remember that to do that you need the actual total of the receipt, not just an estimate.
The end of the month comes and you don’t have the extra money that you thought you were going to have to put over into the savings account. What happened?
Then you sit down to put the actual figures into the budget. You don’t understand what happened to all your money that you thought that you were going to have at the end of the month. Everything’s going smoothly. You’re halfway through the budget and you’ve stuck to it.
Then you get to the shopping spree tickets and you’ve totally blown the budget. You realize that this is where your money has gone. You realize that you didn’t think about the budget at the time the “BIG” sale and shopping spree took place. You also realize that this may be what has been happening to your money every month before you decided to set a budget and try to stick to it.
This happens a lot in every day life. The budget is a tool that has alerted you to a possible problem with shopping. So what happens now?
3. Make changes.
After you go over the budget and realize that you may have a shopping problem, you realize that you need to make changes.
Change is a hard thing for some people to swallow. It’s not always easy and it can be painful. Determination or willpower come into play when making changes. How bad do you want to stick to the budget and starting attaining your budget goals?
4. Find a balance.
Finding a balance that you can live with is often hard. Many people get to the make changes stage and decide that they would rather have a shopping spree than to save money.
In the case above, finding a balance that you can live with might be simply developing a savings plan that will allow you to save up the money for a shopping spree every two months or whatever period of time that you are comfortable with setting. Another possible answer is that you stop shopping “cold-turkey” for a little while.
What does finding a balance mean to you? To me, it means to find a way that you are comfortable in your quest to be frugal while sticking to the budget. I think that finding a balance between being frugal and your lifestyle is a very personal thing. It’s something that only my husband and I can define for our family and it’s something that only you can define for you and your family.
Till next time,
JT Locke
The Frugal Housewife
