keep a budget

Action

For every category of expense (food, transportation, shelter, clothing, entertainment, etc), decide the maximum amount of money you want to spend on that category per month. Then track your expenses, attempt to spend no more than the budgeted amount, and compare how you did every month.

Discussion

Some people find it easy to come up with a budget and stick to it. Some people find it impossible or very stressful. Budgeting can put focus on what you can’t do rather than what you can do. Despite mainstream advice that makes it sound like there is only one option for money management, keeping a budget isn’t the right move for everyone. So, also consider the Pattern don’t keep a budget.

Also, keeping a budget might be a valuable pattern to adopt for a period of time, for the purpose of changing habits. Once the desired habits are in place, the activity of strict budgeting can be relaxed or dropped.

Budgeting makes the most sense in a consumerist paradigm where the object of life is to optimize consumer spending, that is, where the aim is to spend the maximum amount of money on goods and experiences while still hitting one’s minimal savings targets and not going into debt. In a consumer mindset, you increase your budget limits when you increase your income. Another purpose of the consumer’s budget is to save up money… in order to buy larger ticket items like sports cars, boats, or spendy vacations.

For individuals pursuing a post-consumer lifestyle in Deep Response to the predicaments of the 21st century, the aim is not to spend as much money as possible without being irresponsible. The aim is to decouple quality of life from consumer spending (above a certain threshold of minimal expenses), attain uncommon levels of personal autonomy, and pursue an alternative and bespoke vision of The Good Life here at the end of this world.

This is the difficulty when reading common advice for different aspects of living life. Many pieces of ‘common sense’ advice out there have built in assumptions about what your goals are. Those assumptions may or may not be correct.

(Another example is that common investing advice assumes your financial goal is wealth maximization under current economic conditions. But your actual investing goal might be wealth preservation and stewardship under conditions of unfolding catabolic social, political, and ecological collapse. The strategies will be different!)

One alternative to keeping a budget, for example, is expense tracking coupled with behavior/habit change (moving from a Command and Control paradigm to an Observation and Assessment paradigm). Another is simply to do a No Buy Year. (A No Buy Year is admittedly like having a budget, just where most of the categories’ spending limits are set to zero dollars.)