It’s natural to worry about expenses when you’re creating a personal budget. The uncertainty of the future is a big stress factor: Will your car break down? How much electricity do you really use? Wait––isn’t your sister’s birthday next month? Would-be budgeters often stop before they start, overwhelmed by the stress of reading the future. While it may be natural to worry, that doesn’t mean it is necessary. With proper expense forecasting know-how, you needn’t worry about having a drastically under-funded budget. You almost certainly have some fixed expenses, and those are a solid place to start. Rent, for example, is generally the same from month to month, as are car payments, bus passes, and mortgage payments. The certainty of these expenses can make it easier to deal with the unknown ones, not only because it gives you a concrete base for your budget, but because your income with those expenses subtracted will probably leave you with significantly less money to distribute. Most people probably wouldn’t see that as an advantage, but it is—as long as it’s not too tight, it’s easier to budget a smaller amount of money than a large one.

The money left over from your fixed expenses will then be divided among the other categories in your budget, your variable expenses. These tricky little devils tend to be different from one month to the next, so they can be hard to estimate. If you’ve kept records of your spending for the last month (or the last several months), you can average those to give you general guidelines for the coming month. You’ll probably eat close to the same amount of food, for instance, even if it’s not exactly the same.

It takes practice to get good at predicting your expenses. As you use your budget, you may find that you have too much money in some categories and not enough in others, but don’t give up. Taking control of your finances is worth the work.

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To keep this from happening, try to anticipate your cravings and take control of them. Instead of buying a snack whenever you want one, try setting a goal, such as not buying any snacks for a week, with your favorite snack as a reward at the end. It’s much easier to be strong if you’re rationing your fun rather starving yourself for it.

To make your budget work for you, you need to plan as well as possible. Do all that you can to keep from being taken by surprise. Remember any upcoming special events well beforehand, as well as other irregular expenses like magazine subscriptions, and plan for them in your budget. Some expenses (like your car dying) usually can’t be predicted with exactness, so you may want to set aside a certain amount of money in your budget for unforeseen expenses.

The beginning of your budgeting experience will probably be the most turbulent because you will not have had time to build up this emergency fund, but keep it up. Unforeseen expenses are not the same as unacceptable expenses, and they can be recovered from.

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Your goal in budgeting should be something along the lines of a plan that helps you spend your money how you want to rather than sacrificing it to passing whims. Making a budget that succeeds can be daunting, but one way to make it easier is by creating budget categories that make sense. Budget categories are the sections of your budget into which you divide your money, such as “groceries,” “mortgage payment,” or “entertainment.” For the organizationally minded or those who wish they were––and if you’re making a budget, that probably means you––it can be incredibly tempting to overcomplicate a new budget. Resist the temptation! For example, it’s unnecessary to have a separate category for each item you buy (’heads of lettuce’, ’shoelaces,’ and so on). Almost certainly such a minute budget would consist of hundreds of categories and require immense stretches of planning time. In addition to being a pain to create, such a budget would tie down your finances and take away your flexibility, which is another way of setting yourself up for failure. It’s more useful to create general categories that are not too broad, but not too narrow. Rather than setting exact and specific expectations at the level of the product (I will spend four dollars and fifty-three cents on hamburger, and not one penny more), try setting your goal according to your needs and resources (I need food to last me through the next three weeks, and I can spend about a hundred dollars). One useful idea for finding a happy medium between being a slave either to your budget or your cravings is to give everything that comes in the form of a bill (mortgage payments, car payments, school tuition, etc.) its own category, but to create general categories for smaller things with uncertain prices. The larger, set expenses will give your budget a sense of stability and detail without you spending hours hunched over your figures and receipts. Finding the middle ground that works for you may take some experimentation, but that’s okay. Don’t be discouraged if it takes a few tries. Make your budget a well-oiled machine rather than a hunk of junk, and remember, once a budget becomes a burden, it’s destined for failure.

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