Budgets are a victim of prejudice. Everyone hates them, but most people who hate them don’t really know them. They have only heard budgets talked about badly and have embraced that negative sentiment as their own. Or they take a simplistic caricature of a budget and deride it to make them feel better about their own budget-less existence. They make jokes about budgets to reinforce the idea that these are absurd, slavish documents that should be ostracized.
Here is the challenge of this chapter – get to know what a budget really is. Start a conversation about budgeting that is free from prejudice. Recognize that what you studied in chapter one were the lies propagated against budgets meant to bias your opinion. Efforts at budgeting tainted by these lies will cripple your ability or willingness to do what is required in budgeting. This turns into self-fulfilling failure that reinforces the biases of a financially-irrational, debt-sick culture which mocks the wisdom of “spending less than you make” and “intentionally knowing and tracking where your money goes.”
Treat budgeting like a co-worker that you were lied to about on his first day on the job and for the first couple of years these lies coerced you into disliking him. You interpreted their every action and conversation through these lies. You have now come to learn that the lies were false, and you want to get to know them for who they really are. The lies were believed and acted upon long enough that you still have to battle your instincts, but you know battling these biases is both the right thing to do and the only way to learn the truth about him.
To help you in this process, we will seek to answer two questions in this chapter:
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