Are you there yet? That point in the summer where you look up and realize that in the midst of vacations, family reunions, fairs, sporting events, cookouts, and travel that you have blown through what you’d hoped to spend on summer leisure?
All of us have done it at one time or another, and it isn’t a great feeling. The summer affords us an easier opportunity to spend time with family in many cases. Children are out of school and not as restricted by extracurricular activities. Vacation spots are more attractive in the summer. Outdoor recreation and gatherings are more common. All in all, there is just more to do for many people during the summer months.
For many of us, we feel those activities are well deserved too! I mean, for Pete’s sake, we’ve been shut up inside during those cold winter months, and now that the rain has stopped and the temperature has warmed up, we’re ready to get out there and enjoy it!
Unfortunately, in our excitement to soak up every bit of enjoyment that the summer months have to offer, we can sometimes go a bit overboard on our spending. In our house, we struggle with maintaining good meal planning during the summer. Sounds counter intuitive right? My wife is a teacher and has the summers off. That allows us to save money on child care, but somehow that money ends up being spent on food pretty quickly if we aren’t careful.
Why is that? Well, when you’re running around with small kids, stopping at the pool and then the children’s museum and then the grocery store on the way back home, guess what it is really easy to do? You guessed it. That drive thru window starts to look really appealing after a day spent trying to convince your 4 and 6-year-old to stop sticking their tongues out at each other, all while trying to appease the 2-year-old who is tired but doesn’t want to sleep.
Before you know it you’ve bought McDonald’s Happy Meals for everyone and are rewarded with temporary silence as they chow down on their food and play with the accompanying toy that my father affectionately refers to as “land fill material.”
The reality is though, that you pay for that convenience. $15-20 at the drive thru might not seem like a huge deal, but do that 3 days a week all of June and suddenly you’ve spent $240 on food that wasn’t really part of the plan. Your budget might be able to sustain that kind of discrepancy, but ours definitely feels it, and we are the ones to blame.
In this way, spontaneity is, to a degree, the enemy of a good spending plan. In our house we make the mistake of substituting good planning for our meals with the spontaneity of eating out. The result is that we sometimes are left wondering why the money seems to be running out before the month does.
Like so many things, eliminating spontaneity doesn’t mean eliminating fun. We know we tend to eat out more in the summer. We are traveling more and doing more things that take us away from our home, which means more meals on the go. It just isn’t practical to pack a lunch for every occasion.
The thing is, good budgeting accounts for that. Telling yourself you just need to pack a lunch for those occasions is bad budgeting. You won’t do it. Instead, write a budget that accounts for eating out more. If it negatively impacts your budget, you might have to cut spending somewhere else. Maybe you have to compromise and limit how much you eat out. Perhaps you decide that you can only justify eating out twice a week, and any other excursions will need to come with a packed lunch. That might be more doable for you. Remember that an imperfect budget you stick to is always better than a perfect one you’ll disregard.
Most of the things we do during the summer are pretty predictable. We know there will be more recreation, more travel, and more money spent on food and gatherings. Instead of futilely telling yourself that you aren’t going to spend money on those things only to fail and wreck your budget, do the smart thing and plan for those expenses. That way you can be prepared for them and won’t get through the summer wondering where all your money went!