Budgeting is one of the most important financial habits to develop. It’s easy to write a budget that you’d think is perfect and things might be humming along well for a few months and then suddenly you get hit with a surprise bill that jeopardizes your finances.
To help avoid that scenario and budgeting a little easier, it can be wise to consider some expenses that tend to slip our minds and cause havoc on our budget. Whether you’re creating a new monthly budget or refreshing an old one, here are some overlooked monthly expenses that we should all include in our budgets.
Home Maintenance
While it’s hard to forget rent or mortgage payments, other household maintenance are easy to forget and can catch you off-guard. From regular carpet cleaning, furniture cleaning, apartment cleaning to random handyman repairs, replacement for damaged appliances, it makes perfect sense to leave room in a budget for home maintenance as those charges keep popping up.
Car Expenses
Budgeting for a car-loan payment is probably top of mind but that’s not the only costs to owning a car. Add up costs like oil changes, tire replacement, brake replacement, tune-ups and find the average over the course of the year and add it to your monthly expenses. Additionally, remember to include parking fees – that adds up!
Donations
A donation to a charity is a worthy expense and perhaps you donate when you see a worthy cause on Instagram or support a colleague who has a fundraiser. This kind of spending is easy to forget about, so make sure to put it in your budget and make a list of your favorite charitable or religious organization you may want to donate to on a monthly or annual basis.
Sherehe
We all like to have a good time. Consider setting aside some money each month to do something fun like catch-up drink with friends, a day road trip to Naivasha, concert tickets, hosting overnight guests, you’ll be able to enjoy these activities without stressing over whether or not they’ll break your budget.
Delivery Fees
If you’d rather order dinner or groceries from the comfort of your home instead of going out majority of the time don’t forget to add that delivery fee expense that gets tacked onto the bill in your budget. Also if you tip the driver, make sure to include that as well.
Gift Giving
It can be easy to overlook gift-giving when you sit down to write your monthly budget but most of us tend to spend a huge chunk of change occasionally when buying gifts. Be sure to include approaching holidays (Secret Santa), birthdays, weddings, baby showers, graduations and all special occasions in your budget whether or not you give gifts every single month of the year.
It takes time to fine-tune your budget and hopefully these reminders are worth thinking about and adding to your budget.
