Budget Blues

July 23, 2011 - Posted by Ryan Mayo

I would like to think I am a well-balanced person. My personality has just the right mix of sobriety without the stodginess, vivacity without the flightiness. Even my face is balanced, with just enough ugly to make it interesting. I can walk the length of a balance beam without falling over. I can even drink a soda through a straw from an open cup while in a moving bus, and not spill a drop.

But give me a budget, any budget, and I start to twitch. Say the words “balanced budget” and I am undone. How can you balance a budget when there are more things to buy than there is money to spend? When I ask this question and start pulling my hair, my husband puts on his “the dealer sold me a lemon and I’ll just have to live with it” look and patiently tells me that if I limited my spending to the essential (or the logical, his look would add), there would be more than enough money and the budget would stay balanced.

I would try to insert words like “national budget” and “national debt” into the discussion but he would suddenly pull out or look at, or touch, any one of my buying-frenzy must-haves and even I would have to admit that maybe these weren’t all that essential after all.

Last week, guilt-free and happily cooking (my husband had taken over the shopping and budgeting tasks), I looked around our kitchen and reminded my husband about the dream kitchen we used to talk about when we were still dating. He said we were just about ready, that he had set aside a modest budget for it. I almost dropped the sauce pan at the dreaded word which I hadn’t heard for some time. “How can I start planning for a dream kitchen on a budget?” I asked him.

“Simple,” my husband said. “You dream, I budget.” And it’s worked fine just like that.

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