Personal Finance and Budgeting, is it a Chore, or is it a Game?

Do you dread looking at your monthly budget? What if it were a game?

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Who wants to look at their budget regularly? Unless you're a numbers fanatic, and you're like me, you probably dread having to sit down and figure out just where your money is going every month. It's challenging to look at, not because we don't understand, but we don't want to think about the parts we overspent. Keeping our budget in order doesn't have to be dreadful each time we look at it. We can create monthly challenges for ourselves and turn that dreadful monthly budget review into a game.

Budgeting can be stressful, especially when money is tight, but it doesn't have to be. Turning that time into a game with a thought process changes the chemicals in our brain and allows us to look at things in a different light. No, it doesn't stretch the money any further, but it does let us think about the process differently, especially if we get the kids involved.

Think of it as teaching children about money and how to budget it. If we tell our kids no, you can't have that toy because there's no money in the budget for it, do they understand what that means? Unless they have been taught about money and budgeting in general, the answer is probably not. In making the budgeting process a game, get the kids involved. It can be a monthly family affair. Kids get thinking and scheming about how they can find money in the budget to get that toy. Now the chore is a game!

Most everyone has a smartphone or tablet in their lives. Get a budgeting app that allows for setting up a personal budget by category and will show graphs. It's best to get one that talks to your bank because that makes the process easier. Two of the best sites out there that I have found for this are Mint and Personal Capital. They are both free to use and offer differing perspectives on looking at our finances.

Mint provides easy-to-use charts to see how you are doing on each budgeted item. It talks to your bank, so you don't need to enter all your information by hand. It is offered by Intuit, which is one of the most popular accounting companies in the world. Follow not just how your bank account is doing, but include your credit cards to get a complete picture of your true worth and learn how to budget better.

Personal Capital goes even deeper and can show you how what you are doing budget-wise today can help you plan for the future. They also offer guided assistance from financial experts to help you know the best way to spend (or not spend) your money. The use of financial experts does cost a fee based on the amount of the worth of your assets. Please see their website for more information.

A way to use these apps as a game would be to constantly keep up to date on them. When a child asks for something, pull out the smartphone and look at the budget with them to determine what budget item the product they are asking for would come from. Tell the child that they can only have the thing if the budget is currently under so much for that category. Let them look at it (assuming they are old enough to understand and do the math) to see if it might be possible or if they need to save money from another budget category to get the item they desire.

Now, if kids aren't a part of your regular life, budgeting still doesn't need to be a stressful process and can be a game for ourselves as well. We can use the same method of tracking our budget. When we want that coffee from Starbucks (if we don't have a separate Starbucks category), we can quickly look at the budget because it's on our phones and decide if there's enough money to afford the coffee. Do we place this purchase in the eating-out category? Or do we need to take that money from a different category and get fewer groceries (or switch out a name-brand product with a generic one) to afford that coffee? The example provided is tiny and straightforward, but the idea is that it makes us stop and question just how much we want something and what we are willing to give up to get it.

It can be a game to challenge ourselves to give something up to save for something bigger. Want to travel? Stop eating out six days a week and learn to eat meals at home. Challenge ourselves by gaming ourselves and reminding ourselves of what we will get when we rearrange our budget to make it happen.