Reflections on God and Money: Creating a Budget (4)

That your trust may be in the Lord, I have made them known to you today, even to you. Have I not written for you thirty sayings of counsel and knowledge, to make you know what is right and true…?

Proverbs 22:18-21

The survival costs many people have most control over are food, fuel and communication. If you can shop around for the cheapest prices and know when shops reduce their prices to avoid having to bin goods passing the sell-by date, you can save a lot of money. If you turn off lights in empty rooms, turn off televisions and computers rather than leave them on stand-by, turning the central heating down a degree, you can accumulate a useful amount of saved money over a month or quarter. And you can often do most or all of these things without actually missing anything or even noticing the difference.

List your lifestyle choices by their importance to you and your family. We are, each one of us, unique individuals and we have preferences different to others. This is why living in a consumer society can be so dangerous, quite literally ‘soul destroying’, because we are easily pressurised into spending our money like everyone else, in order to be like everyone else. (Your soul is the real you.)

You might wish to argue that a television is a survival cost that you cannot do without, especially if your children think they need it to help with their school work or simply so they can ‘fit in’ at school. You may be right (it is not for me to say) but, contrary to how it may seem, a great many people do without one.

Music may be important to you but the price tag you need to attach to your preference will depend on how to like to enjoy music. If you like listening to the radio, then I expect the cost would be too small for you to identify in your overall electricity costs. If you like buying downloads or CDs, then you can allocate an average cost for the period of your budget. If you like attending free gigs, you may still have to pay for transport and for a drink or snack while you are there. If you pay to hear live music, or to dance in clubs, then you should be able to identify how much you spend. If you enjoy playing music, as either a musician or a DJ, this too has a price tag. In fact, almost all your choices will have price tags and you need to know what they are.

List your impulse spending, even if you think that what you have spent in the past week or month is not typical. Whether you are addicted to cola, chocolate or t-shirts, you need to be real about the cost.

List the amounts you save and how much you give to church, charities and other good causes. That is, everything you ‘spend’ but get nothing for (at least, not now, although you can use your savings later).

Next weekend, I will explore how to manage your budget so that you can spend less than you get and do more of the things that are important to you.

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Handling money and dealing with debt can be complicated and neither the author nor anyone else involved in the production of these Reflections is responsible for any action you take, or fail to take, based on what is written here. You are invited to put a link on your website to these Reflections. You are welcome to copy these Reflections for personal study or for circulation to family and friends on a non-profit basis. For any other purpose, whether or not for profit, you will require written permission in advance from the author before copying, reproducing or transmitting extracts in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or using any information storage and retrieval system.

Saturday 2 February 2013

Creating a Budget (4)