Hey Party-Makers,
I know for some of you, this is literally the worst scariest topic to talk about. Trust me, sometimes it’s my least favorite to think about, too (mainly when I’ve found something I really want). That having been said, part of being a functional adult is knowing what your budget is and learning to stay within the bounds of your budget.
This applies to hosting, throwing birthday parties, holiday parties, weddings, etc. If I ever discover that there’s magic money that appears out of nowhere when you’re getting ready to celebrate something, I’ll let you know.
In our marriage when it comes to budgets our conversations usually go like this: Ben brings the budget up and I sit and nod guiltily at all the impulse buys I know I’ve made that aren’t inside the budget. However, we have found some tools that have helped us really keep each other accountable to the figures we set for ourselves.
Currently, we use Mint for our budgeting needs. It is really easy to use—and it’s free (don’t you hate having to pay money to control your money? Read: checks)! It also helps that they have a really functional app where you can set up shared users to share the budget.
Within their software, you can link your bank accounts, credit cards, personal assets and all of your monthly expenses. From then on you can set very specific categories for your spending, like a treat yoself fund, or a cocktail category. You want to generally have broader categories, because—and this is the coolest part—the app keeps track of how you use the money you’ve linked to it. So if it sees that you spent money at a bar, it funnels that to your budget for cocktails.
Now, I know that for some of you it can seem scary to provide a company with all of that information about yourself. But they are Norton Secured and TRUSTe Certified—which means people who’s job it is to keep your information safe—trust them and work with them. If you need to read up a little more on their policies and security, you can do that here.
What we’ve done in order to stay within our budget, is to create sub-budgets within our overall budget to allocate a certain amount of money a month to go towards hosting. This way, you’ve got a full perspective of what your total income is, and can adjust accordingly in your planning needs. And say you go a little over budget in your planning? You can hop on over and check your cocktail budget and see that you have only spent a quarter of that budget, and compensate your overspending by simply not buying anymore cocktails for the month.
If you’re just a paper-budget person though, we totally get that and we salute you for having the discipline to stay within those bounds. If that’s true of you, here are our general suggestions for finding your party budget:
- Have an overall budget of what money is coming in and going out each week. This helps you set realistic expectations for what your budget should be.
- Set your party budget just a little bit higher than the number you originally chose. This way you can account for the unexpected expenses that come along with planning and hosting (like finding the perfect drink dispenser at World Market that you can’t live without).
- Once you’ve figured out your budget, add it to your regular budget and check to make sure the numbers even out.
- Review your budget continually—make sure you know what it is, and faithfully log any expenses into that budget—even if that means logging over-budget expenses. This way you can compensate and know where you need to spend less in order to stay within your overall budget.
For our party life, we have to have hosting budgets added into our budget, because even if we’re not actively partying all day everyday, we are still planning towards celebrations and investing in resources (i.e. party supplies) so that we can be prepared to do so (just as soon as I convince Ben on a party idea).
Partying On,
