Budgeting in a Pandemic

Our family budgets from June to June instead of the traditional Janaury to December timeframe.  We decided a long time ago to structure our expenses that way because of school year tution due dates.  It has worked for us and some years we have been better at it than others.  The most expensive year of lives was from June 2018 to June 2019 with Brett and Cal in college, Meg and Cam at Bethany and both of the younger two needing braces.  We also took several family trips that year including Meg's senior spring break trip to California and Brett's wish to go to Universal Studios before he finished grad school.  

I do the majority of our yearly budgeting and Doug focuses on the long term financial goals.  Last April he challenged me to a new monetary goal which was tighter than our previous year.  I couldn't disagree with him on the reasonings behind it as we had Meg moving on to college and would need to start thinking about purchasing a vehicle for her.  Thus, we tightened our belts a little bit and kept track of each purchase to see if my numbers were feasilbe.  We were even able to plan a trip to Disney World for the entire familiy inside of this budget.  By February we were doing very well and it looked as though we would come out well ahead of our goal. 

Then the pandemic hit, and we soon found out that Doug would have to forfeit 25% of his salary due to the downturn in the economy.  At first I panicked.  We could put money on our home equity line, but neither of us wanted to do that.  We hadn't paid all of the Disney vacation package that was due the first of June yet and still had our regular expenses to worry about.  When Doug talked about the worst case scenario - losing his job, I realized that the reduction in wages was nothing compared to that.  Thus, I spent a weeked in April reworking our budget, getting rid of some categories and reducing others.  Everyone was on board to help cut what they spent and last night I was pleased to figure out that we actually had come out $4000 ahead of our goal this year.  That was fantastic news as we look to switch over to a new budget year next Friday.  Proud of everyone for stepping up.  It looks as though we may even be able to buy Meg a car this fall.