The end off the cuff budgeting…

I’ve never been much of a budgeter. That’s not to say I don’t keep an eye on cash flow and know more or less what’s coming in and what’s going out. However, sitting down and putting together a real pen and ink budget has all the appeal of a back alley root canal.

Having said that, I couldn’t help but notice that the spate of vet bills coming through these last four months has put more than a little bit of strain on my mental accounting. In fact, keeping the accounts balanced put me in a highly unusual (and disagreeable) position of either needing to sell assets or take on debt to float the bills until inflow caught up with outflow.

I’m a collector by nature, so the process of acquiring things has always come easy. I’m less comfortable when the time comes to sell some of those things off – even if I picked them up originally with a vague plan that someday I may need to convert them to cash if I ever found myself pinched. I know many people enjoy that side of the process as much as they do acquiring things in the first place. Not me. I tend to acquire and then hold on grimly.

With the current, almost punitive rate of interest on consumer borrowing, though, letting a few things go was the lesser of two evils. Maybe it’s only lesser because I know full well I’ll end up buying them back whenever the opportunity presents itself in the future.

The point of all that is to say I’m finally coming around to the idea of putting a bit more academic rigor into my household budgeting process. The personal finance gurus would probably disagree, but step one is funding a much more robust “self-insurance” account for future veterinary expenses – the one thing I can find that consistently blasts gaping holes in my operating budget. After that, everything else just sort of takes care of itself… or at least that’s what the numbers seem to be telling me.