Summer is a Season When Your Spending Can Easily Go Off Track.

Vacations, social events, energy bills, and forgotten expenses can add up quickly. Without a spending plan, it’s easy to spend too much and lose sight of your cash flow. Here are common summer money challenges.

• Vacations: Travel costs add up quickly—flights, hotels, car rentals, meals, and entertainment. People often say, “Well, it’s a vacation, we are not going to track what we spend.” 
• Summer Camps: One Child, Five Camps, $2,700 Later, who knew?
  Summer camps often require deposits early in the year and can be a large unplanned cost.
• Social Events: Summer events are fun, from dinners, concerts, parties, and many others. 
• Home Improvement:  These projects can get expensive quickly and tend to grow as you work on them. Scope creep is a real thing and can add 25% to 50% or more to the cost of a project. 
• Utility Bills: Air conditioning and increased water consumption can spike utility bills. 
• Destination Weddings and Graduations: Attending events often means increased travel expenses and buying gifts. 
• Infrequent Expenses: Car and home maintenance, insurance payments, medical and dental expenses, back-to-school shopping. 
• Credit Card Debt:  Covering summer expenses with credit cards creates a high-interest debt that increases costs.

Is a budget the solution? Traditional budgets are based on estimating income and expenses for a specific time period, but they often fall short because they don’t account for the unexpected. A spending plan, on the other hand, is built around the money you actually have. It allows you to assign every dollar a purpose before you spend it. This includes planning ahead for irregular expenses by breaking them into monthly amounts, so you’re financially prepared when they occur. The key is knowing where your money is going in real time, so you can stay in control and make informed decisions year-round. 

You can avoid overspending in the summer by tracking your expenses and having a clear spending plan. When something comes up, you can adjust and decide where that money is coming from. There are only 3 options: take it from another category, add more money, or go into debt. 

Proactively managing your cash flow, you will better be able to fund high priorities, your financial plan, education, home purchase or remodeling, getting out of debt, and that trip to Tahiti. 

Schedule a free 25-minute confidential session with Doug at MeetwithDoug.com to create a spending plan that works. Book your complimentary, confidential 25-minute call at MeetWithDoug.com