I really should revise my budget

I have long insisted that we should all strive to evolve as individuals. For various reasons, I have not been following my own advice. This includes problems that I have with the response to change. As one of my many self-evaluations, I have decided to look into what kinds of changes I really should make in my life. Unfortunately, obstacles will likely be too much for me to overcome.

Years ago, I joined two others in buying a house. I took responsibility for the down payment, and this pretty much wiped out my savings. Since then, I have been trying to restore my savings. Actually, I have been trying to exceed that amount. If anything happens to me, I prefer to leave something behind for the other two.

I generally haven't been too bad with my finances. There's a reason I could afford the down payment without maintaining a budget. After the payment, this changed. To make sure I saved money, I created a budget for the first time in my life.

I'm not going to detail how this budget worked. What I will say is that I embraced a moving target for savings. Each month, I had less spending than the last. Eventually, this was going to completely disappear, which is why I revised my budget.

I might have swung too far in the other direction. Early on, this budget gave me less than ten cents each month of spending money. Currently, I might actually be over a dollar. I'm spending significantly more than that.

I would say that my current budget is actually sustainable, but I'm currently broke. Each month, I'm digging a deeper and deeper hole. Eventually, it might be possible to recover these deficits without any alterations to my budget. This would take me years if not decades.

It would be nice to have something in between these two budgets. I would love to have more money to spend without having to embrace an unsustainable budget. I do have some ideas, but I'm not ready to pursue any of them.

Unlike most of the posts in this series, I fully intend to follow through on this one. I'm just not ready. In short, I want to wait until there are other reasons to adjust my budget. I have a target in mind. This target is still a very long way off into the future. If I hit that point, I will create a new budget.