Well, I’m back from vacation.

Trips always do interesting things with my budget. I seem to be completely incapable of anticipating how much they’ll end up costing in the end.

Sometimes I over-budget and then feel great about spending less than I thought; often I spend more than I’d hoped.

Never am I right on.

Fortunately, budgeting isn’t about being perfect, it’s about being persistent.

Like lots of other things, budgeting gets better (and easier) the more you do it. But that doesn’t mean you’re immune from “Wacky Months.”

And when you have a Wacky Month, with trips or unexpected costs (or just flat out bad planning), you don’t need to stress too much because next month you’ll start a new budget and try again.

You’ll do better next month, and even better the month after that.

Photo by: theenglishguy

Sometimes the hardest part of active budgeting is simply remembering to update your budget.

Simple, quick, easy things like keeping your budget current are either easy to forget, or constantly shuffled into the back of our minds.

One solution is to take advantage of the ten thousand passwords you have to keep track of these days:

The next time you’re prompted to update one of your passwords, change it into something that will remind you to stay on top of your budget.

That way, everytime you log in, you’ll have to type out your own reminder.

If you try it, let me know how it works out for you!

Photo by: Gilles Gonthier

If I learned anything from elementary school, it’s that groundhogs have the cosmic ability to predict how long winter will last depending on their shadow.

This supernatural event only happens on the 2nd of February every year. If the groundhog sees his shadow he goes back down his hole to hide from six more weeks of winter. The universe will have spoken.

We have no ability to change whether winter will last another six weeks or not – that is up to the cosmic groundhog – but you do have the ability to choose to follow a budget for the next six weeks. Try signing up for One Month of Budgeting for some extra help:

If you’re reading this in a reader, you can click through here to see the form.

(Ok, the One Month of Budgeting emails only last for five weeks, but you still get six emails.)

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PS – I was going to include a bunch of mildly obscure references to the movie Groundhog Day, to drive my wife nuts, but I deleted them.

Oh what the heck:

Watch that first step… it’s a doo-hoo-sie! Am I right, or am I right? Right? Right?