Budgeting with a Wish Farm

With the Winter holidays approaching, as well as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the after-holiday sales, I thought I'd share a budgeting tip we've been using for a few years now that helps minimize buyer's guilt.

Using YNAB (You Need A Budget), we budget all of our income by giving every dollar a job, meaning that we never have extra cash without designating what we think we'll be spending it on. We first take care of immediate obligations (like bills), then basic needs (like groceries), priorities (like classes for El), and goals (like holiday funds). For more details, check out my original budgeting post here.

Within our budget, whether we have the money at that moment or not, we have a wishlist to record all the things, trips, or projects that catch our attention (anything allowed, no matter how silly). We used to also use a Wish Farm, where we’d move a select few items and focus only on them (one small, one medium, and one large item at a time), but once we whittled our list down to larger projects, we found that it didn’t help us prioritize as it did originally.

Some things get funded right away when we're assigning jobs to dollars each month and others sit empty. Every once in a while, items sit funded without action, because more research or a mental change is needed in order to complete the transaction. When this happens, we either give it more time or accept that it's not something we actually want, move the money elsewhere, and archive the item.

Doing this really declutters my mind, because I'm capturing thoughts as they come and allowing the dream to actuate! And avoiding the allure of buying random items with the holiday sales doesn’t hurt either.