Death by budget

Or, how to frustrate your plans with over-planning them. I was thinking about how badly I budget today when I was mentally complaining about paying for the magazine subscriptions for this year. Since we got new subscriptions when we moved in last July, all of them are due at the same time. I get most of my magazines from ValueMags (which through Stockback or eBates gives me a 30% rebate) as they always have good prices, and the fat rebate doesn't hurt either. This time however I got a couple subscriptions through NetMagazines (I did the 3-cents-an-issue-or-whatever subscription to Kiplinger's using the awesome code at Free Money Finance), and then used a $5 off code on a couple other magazines. Unfortunately NetMagazines didn't actually sell subscriptions to everything, so I just got Wired and Jane through them.

Kiplinger's - $4.91
Wired - $11.99 - $5 = $6.99
Jane - $10 - 5 = $5

Then I bought the others through ValueMags:

Cook's Illustrated x 2 (one for us, one for my dad) - $24.95 - 30% = $34.93
Popular Science - $15.94 - 30% = $11.16

I got a subscription last year to Cosmopolitan, because I used to buy it at the supermarket now and again, and thought it would be cheaper just to get the subscription. Unfortunately I am just not vapid enough to read an entire year and still like it, so I didn't renew. I love Jane however, and recommend it to all intelligent women. Cook's Illustrated is rather expensive (it's only six issues a year) but they've got really great recipes, as well as a lot of tips and tricks and reviews that you can only get when people spend all damn day figuring out the molecular structure of pizza dough. So it's worth it to me as part of this whole teaching myself to not be a terrible cook thing.

Ttotal cost of subscriptions for the year is $63, which for me is a big chunk of money to pay all at once. (Actually I had to pay about $83 up front since I won't get the rebate for a while.) And these were all the best prices I could find, too. I won't even think about how much they would have cost without shopping around. I probably could have gotten some cheaper on eBay but that seems like a hassle.

So I started thinking, how could I have budgeted for this ahead of time? What if I set up a separate ING account and put in $5 a month all year and used that to pay for it? That seems like a good idea... What about all of the other irregular expenses, like birthday gifts? I already save up some money for Christmas, but maybe I should add up the cost of everybody that I expect to get a small gift (I usually give presents less than $10 for birthdays) and anybody I think might get married (most of my friends are not of the age yet) and what about Mother's and Father's Day? Should I put $3 a month away all year for the inevitable new fan purchase at the beginning of each summer? What about $2 a month for my virus program subscription?

You see how I can get carried away.

I know that logically these things are what the "other" category of your budget is supposed to be for, but I'm such an over-planner that I would try to put all of these things in. Which is basically why I don't really budget. I have some idea of how much money is too much to spend on groceries in a month, but since I don't really have many expenses, I generally just try to think if there's anything that I need to pay for that month that's unusual, and subtract it from the general spending pool left over after all the bills have been paid. Because if I tried to plan ahead how all the money would be spent, I would end up with a hundred little envelopes each with $3.47 in them. The non-budget budget seems to be working OK so far, since if I don't have money, I stop spending it. I try to resist the siren call of over-organization and stay loose with my planning in general.