Budgeting as a Form of Self-Love

Why I broke down in the dairy aisle

It’s 2024 and I’m focusing on a new budget

Ok ok, it’s almost March, I know, but after some deliberation and a little planning, with this “barely used” year comes, finally, a new budget.

Over the past few years, I have been working hard to save X amount per year while paying off X in debts. I didn’t really put much thought into the process other than staunchly sticking to the numbers I manufactured, regardless of my poorly oversighted lack of wiggle room. This year I spent time thinking about my interaction with money and my goals as a whole. This is the year I focus on financial longevity and sustainability; making the most while working the least.

As a nurse, I can pick up as many extra shifts as I can humanly handle. Realistically, I don’t want to. The job comes with a lot of mental and emotional fatigue, sometimes even nightmares for days afterward.

It takes a day or two to move back into my skin after a streak of three 12-hour shifts. My 2024 budget is not just for money, but also for my time, because I have big extracurricular goals I want to achieve this year, too.

Though making a budget can feel mechanical and disciplinary, it can be a practice in intimate self-discovery, care, and kindness. I have uprooted a few behaviors and patterns within myself in the process of financial planning.

After living far below the poverty line and being borderline unhoused for a couple of years before becoming a nurse, I noticed that giving myself a hard grocery limit makes me panicky and anxious about food insecurity. I vividly remember having $40 for groceries each week, sometimes less if an unexpected expense came up. Just walking in the grocery store made me cower with hopelessness, I didn’t want to see the food I couldn’t afford.

Later, one of the more surprisingly joyful activities I experienced after earning money as a career nurse was simply going to the grocery store. Within reason, I could buy anything I really needed, and if I saw a snack or beverage I wanted to try, I could!

This was absolutely not possible in my more impoverished years.

Early on in my new career, I remember looking at two different flavors of kefir, deciding which to bring home, when an inner voice chimed in saying “You know, you could just get both.” Perhaps it was the post-run emotional lucidity, or maybe I was just hungry, but I sobbed fat tears of relief in waves, right there in the Kroger dairy aisle.

Timidly, I placed both kefirs in my cart, half expecting a grocery store employee to snatch them away before I got to the checkout line, exposing me as a financial fraud. To this day, I religiously check my bank account balance before heading to the cashier, ready to defend myself if my card somehow declines.

I don’t have many luxuries in this life, but I’ve decided that a relatively open-ended grocery budget will be one of them.

One warm and breezy February afternoon, armed with half a notebook scribbled in with numbers, percentages, and summer playtime plans, I was ready to sit down with my fiscal plan. Gripped with the motivation of a late-day cup of Earl Grey tea; my budget spreadsheet was curated with bold font, appropriately placed borders, and merged cells. I used muted, alternating row colors. Every skill I remembered from my millennial high school computer classes is now tastefully on top shelf display. The numbers entered carefully, precariously placed on their margins, ready for my accountability to bring them to life.

Now the money just has to be made —

as infrequently as possible.