The Expected and Unexpected Benefits I Got From Making a Personal Budget

It is not until last week that I created my budget and went through my bank statements from the past 18 months. I‘m not disappointed; after a few days, the positive effects of having made a personal budget are already noticeable. Here are a few of them and hopefully this will convince some of you to make your own budget if you haven’t already.

“I know how much I spend.” was one of my reasons for thinking a budget was useless. Well, if someone had asked me a few weeks ago how much my monthly food and grocery bill was, I would have said about $350.

Now, I know that this is not true. In fact, in the last 12 months, I spent an average of $450 per month on food, which is 30% more than what I thought. I don’t eat in restaurants very often. As a matter of fact, most of them were closed in the last year because of the measures against COVID-19. Likewise, I very rarely order take-out and I never use services like UberEats. Still, the bills don’t lie.

I could have remained clueless for several more years, but instead, there is now an extra $100 per month in food expenses ($1200 a year) that I can account for. It is now up to me to use this knowledge to better scrutinize my habits and explain this gap between reality and my perceptions.

This is the logical continuation of my previous point, but it’s pretty hard to set goals when you don’t measure what you’re trying to improve.

Going back to my food spending, I could have said, “From now on I’ll try to spend only $250 on food per month,” thinking that I was only spending $350. Now, knowing that it’s really $450, $350 seems like a much more realistic short-term goal. I’ll still try to…

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