***This is my guest post on Thirty Handmade Days. To go ahead and read the full story, head here or start reading below!

I don’t know about you but summer, it’s my weakness when it comes to our finances. Somehow, we end up so busy that I usually end up completely forgetting to even pay attention to how much we’re spending and what our budget is and usually end up struggling to get our budget back on track. 

But over the years, I’ve learned how to wrangle in our budget and get it back under control before it goes so far out of control that it’s mission impossible to reel back in.

Stop and Start

The moment you realize that you’ve been failing with your budget (or not budgeting at all), stop and start.

Stop spending money until you’ve sat down and gone through your budget. Once you’ve figured out what your budget is, then you can start spending money based on your budget.

If you’ve never created a budget before it may be a tad bit more challenging to create one, but it’s not impossible. I suggest using the Quick Budget which is literally a super quick way of creating a budget based on the money already sitting in your bank account.

Prioritize

Once you’ve reeled your spending back in, I suggest going through your expenses and prioritizing which ones are the most important ones. I personally refer to these as “must have” expenses which are things like:

• Housing (rent/mortgage)
• Transportation (for to and from work)
• Food (groceries – not dining out)
• Utilities (keeping the lights on)

The reason for doing this, is whenever you create your budget, I suggest you start with these expenses because they’re the ones that you not only should pay but want to pay in order to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach.

Once you have your priority expenses accounted for in your budget, you can then move on the less important ones, like entertainment.

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