Weekly review
I’ve written about doing a monthly review and an annual review, but never a weekly review (arguably the most important!). This was overdue.
One of the reasons budgets fail is that we have a set-it-and-forget-it mentality around them. We make a budget, attach arbitrary numbers to random categories, and maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll look back at the end of the month and see that we didn’t stick to it. This makes perfect sense, though. How would you know if you were sticking to the numbers you chose? And, how can you know if the numbers you chose are reasonable? For these reasons, amongst others, a weekly review is critical.
When doing any review (weekly, monthly, or annually), your job is to serve as an anthropologist of your spending. You want to look at it objectively and understand where you spent and why. If you find yourself justifying or rationalizing certain purchases, you have removed your objectivity. It will happen! Don’t judge yourself, for it is already done. Just be aware of it happening. If we aren’t objective to how we’re spending, we cannot make space for change. With that in mind, here are more reasons to do a weekly review:
A weekly review gives you context for where you stand in your allotted categories for the month. If, for example, you have $800 a month to spend on food, and by the 5th day of the month you have spent $600 dollars, you will need to be very thoughtful about how to use $200 over the next 25 days. Without checking in each week, you might find that at the end of the month, you have spent $1,500 and you’re not sure how it happened. And, that additional $700 must come from somewhere. Everything is a tradeoff.
A weekly review will help you bring mindfulness to your choices. Using the example from above, if by the 5th day of the month you have spent $600, you’re going to want to see why that is and what kind of choices you have been making and what kind of choices you want to make going forward.
A weekly review makes tracking our expenses meaningful. Tracking our expenses can feel rote. You look at your account, you write down what you spent and voila, you’re done. Not so fast. You are tracking for a reason!
A weekly review gives you more chances to think about what you want, and whether your actions are aligned with your values and your goals. Is the way you’re spending truly aligned with your values and your goals? Spending time each week evaluating your spending will shed more clarity on whether you’re on your intended path.
A weekly review helps you plan for things that occur that you might not have known about. As much as we aim for our budget to plan for everything, it still happens that things come up that we cannot, or did not, plan for. A weekly review allows us to adjust in the moment, so we aren’t thrown off for the whole month.
Make your weekly review fun. Set aside time in your calendar for yours. Grab a drink, put on your favorite tunes, and check in with yourself. Looking at where we’re spending can feel intimidating. It might feel easier to not look. But, if you are objective while doing your review, you can remove the judgment and use the weekly review to make intentional, meaningful choices going forward.
Do you do a weekly review?