I recently posted about having tracked my spending for the first time ever for a consecutive 30 days; I posted an Excel sheet of every expense of mine for the entire month of April.
So I'm doing good for the month of May, however, a family member passed away. I have forgone a lot of funerals in the past and am attending this one. So we're talking $400ish for the flight. Plus I'll be out of town for 5 days so there will be some food expenses, and my part of gas and hotel room. Lastly, the person that passed did not have insurance and I really really wanted to give my uncle (father of the child that passed) at least $100. It's not much but maybe it will help with his part of transportation and food expenses incurred while out of town for the funeral.
Basically, I'm estimating I'll be spending about $750 for this trip. The thing is, I had an unexpected expense come up last month that was about $900. I spent almost all of my EF paying for it, so this time I may have to dip into my ROTH to help fund this trip :( I just opened the ROTH this year so that means I'd be taking out a pretty significant portion of it.
My concern is this: I'm actually a little fearful I might fall off the bandwagon of saving soon due to these expenses. In the past, I've tried to initiate a process for budgeting, and as soon as something unexpected came up and threw me off track, I'd end up giving up/stopping the process. I guess the question I am getting at here is this:
How do you keep set backs from sending you into a slippery slope of falling off the budget bandwagon?
I had been tracking all of my expenses daily this month like I did in April. When I heard about the death 4 days ago I haven't tracked anything since. I guess part of me feels like "Why bother? My budget is already blown for the month.". In order to make up for the money I'm taking out to cover the trip, there are things I could do but they involve things such as cutting down on my 401K contribution. I'm currently doing 22%, which is the most I ever contributed. I could drop it down to 5% until I've made up what I spent for the trip and gotten my EF fund back up. But then it makes me scared to do so because I think of the money I'll be losing and I wonder if/when I'll actually get it back up to the 22%.
As you can see, I worry a lot lol. I guess I'm just trying to think of a game plan to handle these situations better. Maybe it just comes down to having a larger EF fund really. Which I was in the process of building, but sh&t happens......