There are all sorts of articles everywhere that will tell you how to avoid blowing your budget…but what do you do if you DO blow your budget? Well that exact thing happened to me this weekend so now is a decent time to tackle it because lets be honest if you are part of the 99% of people that aren’t always perfect, it will happen to you at one point or another. Now Im not referring to “I got super sauced and bought a corvette from a used car dealer” kind of blown budget. More along the lines of “unplanned dinner and taxi trip” kind of thing. Anywhere from a few bucks to a few hundred.

So this weekend, I went over budget. We went down to Denver to visit some friends this weekend and I budgeted a certain amount of money for going out. One slight problem: we went out friday night with friends from work as well. This took out roughly 1/2 of the money I had planned for the weekend (I was expecting to spend only a few bucks friday night). Long story short I kept to budget until about 10 PM when we decided to take the light rail to a karaoke bar. If you haven’t ever been to a good karaoke bar with a huge group of fun people, I highly recommend it. So anyway four hours, one rendition of The Bad Touch (complete with dance), one rendition of Beat it (complete with attempt at dance) , taxi ride, and taco bell meal later I was roughly $125.00 over budget.

So what to do?
Well, the trick is that you should always put aside money each month for “unexpected expenses.” Aha, but I ALREADY used my set aside money.

So what now?
Its painfully obvious but should be pointed out anyway; cut back for this week, eat a few more meals at home, don’t go out next weekend.

For the sake of argument lets say you are already living perfectly frugally, what else can you do? Well there is a little trick called payment shifting. I don’t recommend it except as a last resort. Its this: you postpone when you pay a certain bill so that it coincides with the next paycheck. An example is, I get paid on the 1st and the 15th of every month. My mortgage is due on the 16th of the month. I pay my mortgage with money from my first paycheck of the month, if I had a situation where I was behind I could use my second paycheck of the money, effectively buying myself an extra 15 days worth of money if I needed until I had a chance to make back up the original money that was overspent.

By no means am I advocating blowing your budget but we are all human (even Michael Jackson, despite outward appearance) and mistakes happen. The real takeaway is that if you make one mistake do NOT get discouraged and just start putting things on credit card that you cannot pay off or give up on budgeting.

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