Are Your Brackets AND Your Budget Busted?

March 23, 2012

Last weekend, Lehigh beat Duke in the NCAA basketball tournament.  Norfolk State beat Missouri.  Ohio University (a small school), not Ohio State (the behemoth), beat the University of Michigan.  Several serious underdogs beat overwhelming favorites.  These were all David vs. Goliath games and 3 of the little Davids won.  That made a lot of alumni at those schools very happy.  Is there any downside?  Only if you are one of the tens of millions of people in this country who, for entertainment purposes only, fill out an NCAA Tournament bracket.  These games are what basketball fans, and non-basketball fans, who fill out NCAA brackets (for those who are unfamiliar, your bracket picks winners of each game up through and including the championship game) call “bracket busters.”  For example, if you had Duke vs. Missouri in the championship game, your bracket is essentially finished before the action has started.  I had Missouri as a team in my Final Four, so my bracket is toast.  Oh well, there’s always next year….

So, how is my bracket in any way related to your personal financial life?  Just like Norfolk State was my bracket buster, taking my kids out to dinner far more than I probably should is my “budget buster.”  That’s an area of my personal financial life that I know needs to be reduced significantly.  With their school and after-school activities and my work & travel schedules, etc. there isn’t always enough time (yep, that’s my rationalization) to do a great job of planning meals and shopping.  Some nights it’s just easier to head out to a local restaurant for dinner.  I don’t have to cook.  We leave the mess there.  We get to talk about our days.  It’s a fun night out and we really enjoy it..too much!  One adult and 3 kids really can ring up a bill quickly and if we go out too often, (I guess that depends on the definition of “too often”) it can become very expensive.

A few years ago, I started using mint.com to track my expenses and make budgeting easier.  But, like many people that I talk to, occasionally I slip out of good financial habits and into not so good ones.  Taking the kids out to dinner is one of those.  It’s good when it’s limited but when it becomes the norm rather than the exception, it crosses the line.  In a review of my spending recently, I saw just how much I was spending on food.   For what I was spending on restaurants, I could shop at Whole Foods without coupons and then let my perishables perish and still save money.  That was quite a wake-up call.  I could cut that spending in half and we could still really enjoy dinners out.  They might even be more meaningful.  So, I put some budget rules in place and we started grocery shopping together, making dinner a time that we worked together as a team.  One person sets the table, we have a prep cook & a primary cook, and we have a clean-up team.  Everyone gets to pick a meal for the family and we rotate that around, although when I forget to ask one of the kids, it’s my choice.  (We can only eat scallops or steamed crabs, my daughter’s favorites, so often before it gets as expensive as a restaurant meal.)  Not only has it been a good way to work together, but it really has saved money.

What are your “budget busters?”  Do you know what they are?  What are you using to find them and fix them?   For me, it was running a report on mint.com (which I use to look back at historical spending) and using this Expense Tracker (which I use for my forward-looking budgeting) that helped me un-bust my budget.  And, it had some great unintended consequences for my family too.  You probably know what your budget busters are.  Your gut instinct probably tells you where you could reduce your spending.  Now, it’s time to take that hunch and do a little digging.  Use the Expense Tracker.  Register for mint.com.  Find YOUR budget busters and un-bust them.  You’ll be surprised how easy it is once you try…..