Whether you are new to budgeting or have been doing it for years, chances are you have hit this problem one (or a few too many) times.  The number one problem for people who budget is knowing what to do when you go over budget.

No matter who you are, if you are trying to budget, this will happen to you.  Something will come up, you will overspend in a moment of weakness, or you will forget an expense that was coming for the month.  No one is perfect. Trust me.

How will you know if you are over budget?

This is a fabulous question!  Logic tells us, you are over budget when you have spent more than you budgeted in a given area of your life.  Duh, right?

The point is, you should definitely know when you have gone over your budget as soon as possible.  This fits in with the idea you should be monitoring your budget daily, weekly and monthly. Whether you are new to budgeting or not, you have to keep track of your spending and check in with your budget regularly.

The sooner you know you have caused damage by overspending, the sooner you can make adjustments to correct it.

Who wants to panic at the end of the month when you are out of money because of something you bought on the 5th?  Make sure you are checking your budget regularly. If you don’t, you won’t even know when there is a problem, until it is too late to do damage control.

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What should you do when you go over budget?

1.  Don’t panic.

Going over budget literally happens to EVERYONE.  You are not alone. The last thing you should be doing is panicking.  Just stop, take a breath and realize you will survive this.

Be careful when you realize you have gone over budget.  Some people will then be like, “well what’s the point?” and go on a spending spree.  This is not the time to just throw in the towel. Now is the time to realize you spent a little too much so you will need to fix it.

To give you a visual, when my husband is driving he tends to miss turns quite frequently.  Instead of slowing down and taking the next available turn, he panics and accelerates for no apparent reason missing any other close by turns.  This leads to us searching for another place to turn around after he has calmed down and adds tons of time to our overall trip. It drives me insane!!

So, when you go over budget, pump the brakes for a minute, stop spending and figure out what you can do to fix it.

2.  Look for flexibility within your current budget.

The simplest fix you could find would be to steal money from somewhere else in your budget.  Did you have $150 designated toward cosmetics and you will only need $100? Awesome, move that $50 over to where you went over budget.

Move things around as you can to try to compensate for the amount you went over budget.  Don’t be dishonest about this and continue to go over budget. If you know you have no wiggle room in your budget to steal money from another category, that’s okay.  You will have other options.

If you can cover the cost from somewhere else within your current budget then you have made an easy fix!  See? No reason to panic. If not, you will have to try something else.

3.  Decrease your costs.

For the immediate future, try to cut down your food costs.  Our grocery budgets tend to be the largest. A super quick and easy way to do that is to eat cheap and simple meals.  You can use our cheapest (less than $100) monthly meal plan try out simple and inexpensive meals (it even includes a calendar and shopping list), just sign up here!

Go through your categories and see if you could do with less or find a way to make something last longer to save you the money.  Do you really need more shampoo, or could you use hotel bottles to get you through the next month? The same goes for toothpaste, do you have samples left from the dentist?  Use those and save on buying new toothpaste! Get creative in ways to save on some of your expenses. Even cutting $5 or $10 will be helpful.

4.  Increase your income.

This one can be tricky to get money immediately, but if you work it, you can make it happen.

Awesome ways to get money fast:

• Sell your stuff.  Look around your house for anything you aren’t using or could do without.  Sell it immediately. My favorite place to sell that kind of stuff is on the Facebook Marketplace.  I have easily made $2,000 selling random stuff from my home. You would be shocked at what people will buy.
• Babysitting
• Pet-sitting
• Work for Uber or Lyft
• Take online surveys (I have yet to do this one, but everyone and their brother is talking about surveys all the time as a source of income)
• Take on a part-time job.  This one can benefit you in two ways:  you will make money and you will spend less because more of your time will be spent working.

5.  Be completely transparent.

If you are unable to pay a bill, you need to let that company know as soon as possible.  If you have direct and open communication with them, they are much more likely to work with you.

Any business wants to make money.  If you ignore them, they are going to think you are not paying attention to your payments and they will send you to collections.  If you communicate with them and tell them what’s going on and what your intentions are (to pay them!), they will be more lenient because you are still giving them something.

Always talk to the company if you are unable to make a payment.  And whatever you do, do not put a payment on a credit card. That will only make matters worse, and that should not even be an option for you.  That is like using a band-aid on a bullet hole.

6.  Reflect.

Take some time and look into why you went over budget.  Was it something out of your control? Was it an unexpected expense or an expense you forgot to plan for?  Figure out why it happened so you can prevent it from happening again.

Go over your budget with a fine-toothed comb to see where the mishap occurred.  The most common causes are:

• Lack of self-control with your spending.
• Eating out
• Groceries (not having a plan for the month and wasting food)
• Unexpected expenses (true unexpected expenses like your child has to go to the ER because he thought he could fly and jumped out of a tree)

Get our FREE Survival Sheet to remind you what to do when you go over budget!  Get it instantly by signing up below!

How can you prevent going over budget?

If your budget is so tight you tend to go over budget regularly, there are two routes you can go to prevent it from happening.

1.  Cutting costs

2.  Increasing income

Increasing income can mean an online job, a work outside the home job, selling your stuff or making a product to sell.

Typically the biggest cost you can cut is your food budget.  On top of not eating out anymore, meal planning is the ticket to saving money on groceries.  If you are totally new to meal planning, let me convince you to try it here. Once you are convinced, you should try our easiest monthly meal plan that is only $100 for a family of four!  It is seriously a meal plan that takes 30 seconds to prepare because I have included the meal plan and shopping list for an entire month. Seriously!

Aside from food, I have 15 other awesome ways for you to save tons of money super quick!

If you aren’t sure where your budget measures up to the “normal” standards.  You should definitely take the Money Spending Assessment. This will show you where you have room to be saving even more than you currently are.  You will also get some of my best money saving tips!

Sign up below to gain instant access!

Do you have any other things you do when you go over budget?

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