don’t keep a budget

Action

A ‘budget’ here is defined as a list of maximum spending limits for your categories of expenses. This pattern is simply to intentionally not have a list of spending limits that you consciously adhere to, the opposite of pattern keep a budget.

Discussion

Not keeping a budget doesn’t imply that you don’t also have a target cost of living, or stop tracking all expenses, or any other stewardship patterns. Keeping or not keeping a budget is one means people use to steward their financial resources, one tool in the toolkit.

(For example, one stewardship composition could be to simply track all expenses, do a no buy year, live in a tiny house, and don’t own a car, with the goal of spending less than 10k a year. The No Buy Year, Tiny House, and #carfree status will make it difficult to spend more than 10k a year. Why would you need a budget? Most categories would just be set to $0. Just track all expenses to keep an eye on things and otherwise focus on living your best life.)

Keeping a budget can serve as a reminder of what you can’t do: you can’t spend above some arbitrary limit you’ve established. This can serve to focus you on constraint and scarcity, as opposed to the abundance of a post-consumer lifestyle.

A budget can also impel you to spend more than you otherwise would, paradoxically. Establishing that you “can” spend, say, $75 on clothing per month, can evolve into your mind to ‘you should/ought to/get to” spend $75 on clothing, even if you don’t need any clothing that month. With a budget you tend to at least spend up to your spending targets, without considering if the spending is necessary or supportive of your holistic life goals and values.

So while keeping a budget can certainly be a useful tool for a period of time, for the aspiring post-consumer it probably should at most be considered a temporary system for making certain behavior changes before a different pattern or relationship with money is established.

The mini-composition of keeping a budget, and then not keeping a budget, can be considered a dynamic of the strategic pattern of thinking about money to forget about money.