When you think of disciplining your budget, you may not instantly think of giving to charity. That said, giving is actually one of the most productive ways you can help ensure you’re staying true to the budget you’ve mapped out for yourself. Now if you’re wondering, “what does giving have to do with disciplining a budget,” don’t worry.
Giving helps individuals discipline their budget because it instills them with a sense of responsibility and a need to plan ahead. You have to decipher which charities you think are worth giving to, then plan out how often and how much you want to give. Along with this comes accountability.
If you’re curious about how giving can help you discipline your own budget, we’ve got you covered. In the following sections, we’ll discuss how giving forces you to look at your budget, plan accordingly and stay both responsible and accountable. By the end you’ll know exactly how an intention driven project of giving can increase your overall budgetary discipline.
Why View Giving as a Way to Increase Budgetary Discipline?
Before we break down all the ways giving helps you discipline your budget, let’s first address the question of why you should view it that way in the first place. Shouldn’t you just give because it’s the right thing to do? Is it bad to work in your own incentives for giving to others in need?
While it’s true that giving for giving’s sake is a noble act, as humans it’s easier for us to stick to something long term if we place some sort of incentive inside it. If you just give when you feel like it, you’re likely to only give when a solicitor guilt trips you into it. If you make giving a regular part of your budget on the other hand, you’ll be doing it at predetermined intervals.
Also remember a big part of the reason you’re more likely to stick with giving if you plan it into your budget is precisely because you believe in the charities you have selected and you don’t want to let them down. The side effect of this will be you developing greater discipline in your budget. It really becomes a win for everyone.
Regularly Giving Forces You to Look at Your Budget
If you make giving a regular part of your life, you need to plan ahead for it. You don’t want to be the person who pledges to donate a certain amount but backs out at the last second because they no longer have the money or they don’t have a s much as they thought they did.
One of the most fundamental ways in which giving helps you discipline your money, is the fact that it forces you to evaluate your budget. The first step to deciding what you can give, is simply to look back over your budget.
If you feel like you’ve been doing your budgeting on autopilot lately, not really thinking enough about it, adding something new like planned giving can help shake things up. You’ll need to reevaluate how much money you’re saving, spending on essentials and using for recreational purposes.
If you decide to add more charities in the future as you become more comfortable in your giving, you’ll have to continually revisit that budget. Really anything that forces you to be more aware of how you’re spending is going to help you develop more discipline.
Giving Can Help You Evaluate Where Your Money Goes
When you give to a charity, you have to be selective about which one you choose so you know your money is actually going towards the cause of your choice. Unfortunately, there are a lot of big name charities that keep a much bigger percentage of your donation than they let on.
While nobody wants to see charities take from the money people are giving, the challenge of discerning who those charities are can actually help you to better discipline your spending. In having to evaluate charitable organizations, you’re learning to closely assess where your money goes. You’re not just blindly throwing the money into the wind.
It also requires you have a set of standards and stick to them. You have to decide where you draw the line on how much a charity should keep to run their operation and how much they should be giving to those in need. Then, you have to stick with those standards and double check that they were met. If you find you were duped still, you can refine the process.
Giving Helps With Both Long and Short Term Planning
If you decide to incorporate giving into your budget, you not only have to decide which charities to donate to but how often and how much you should give. Are you going to give weekly, monthly or annually? Will you do some combination of those? Will you donate to one charity or multiple? These are all important questions that have to be addressed in your budget.
Finding out when you can give will also cause a rippling effect when you plan for it. As you decide you want to give a certain number of charities, you will have to move things around in your budget to make room for them.
Depending on how much you’re giving and how often, you’ll likely have to engage in both long term and short term planning. In the short term you just want to figure out what you can start giving to today but in the long term you want to set up goals and try to carve them out.
Giving Helps You Practice Goal-Setting
The ability to set goals and then achieve them, is paramount to your success in budgeting effectively. In essence goal setting and achieving is really all that budgeting is. If there’s anything commiting to giving requires, it’s setting and achieving goals.
You have to start with the goal of finding a cause you believe in. This will require you to do research and confront what your priorities really are. That skill translates well to disciplined budgeting because when you decide your budget you also need to know how to research and set solid priorities.
Planned Giving Helps You Avoid Causes You Don’t Believe In
If you don’t already have giving as a part of your budget, you’re more likely to get guilted into giving to a charity you haven’t had time to evaluate. Most solicitors to this kind of charity–be they telemarketers or people blocking the entrance of a store–rely on catching you off guard and guilting you until paying up.
When you put giving in your budget however, you can comfortably say “no thanks”’ to solicitations because you already have your giving planned out. It’s a lot harder to be caught off guard when you’ve already got the subject on your mind.
If they push you you can honestly say you only give to charities you’ve had a chance to do some research into.This should prevent you from being guilted because you have a legitimate reason to be skeptical of a charity you haven’t heard of/researched, and you’re already giving to one or more charities you believe in.
This will free you up to have more money for the charities and causes you believe in, while giving you more control over your own money.
Giving Fights the Need for Instant Gratification
In today’s world where everything is a click away on our smartphones, it’s easy to succumb to the need for instant gratification. That need is one of the biggest hurdles to creating and maintaining a consistent budget. It’s what prevents you from revisiting your budget after the first of January when you created it or worse prevents you from making one in the first place.
You can think of the ability to delay gratification as a muscle that needs to be exercised to grow. Giving just happens to be a great way to perform that exercise while achieving something positive in the world. That’s because both the lasting results of giving and the feeling that you’re contributing, require a decent period of time to blossom.
When you give you don’t get to see the results of your effort right away. Further, a one time small donation might make you feel good for a moment, but it won’t sustain you. Giving overtime on the other hand, can make a significant difference. Plus you can watch the amount you’ve given pile up over time and truly know that you’re doing something positive in the world.
The more you receive these long term incentives, the more your brain is going to recognize that holding back from what you want to do in the moment, actually pays off. Specifically, when it comes to how you are using your money. This skill can easily translate to all other aspects of your budgetary planning.
Giving Puts More Purpose in Your Budget
As humans anytime something needs to be done, we naturally ask why. The more reasons you can give yourself to budget, the more likely you are to take budgeting seriously. This is why anything that adds more purpose to your budgeting, while likely increasing its success.
The amount of money you decide to take out for giving would otherwise probably just fall into the category of recreational spending. While there’s nothing wrong with saving a little money on the side for fun, the more you can put purposeful intent behind every penny you spend, the more likely you are to stick to your budget.
Commiting to Giving Instills a Sense of Responsibility
Pledging to give each month should help fill you with a sense of responsibility. You have a responsibility to the charity, especially if you pledge how much you’re going to give ahead of time. You also have a responsibility to yourself because you will have determined how much you were going to give ahead of time.
This can serve as extra motivation to keep your budget on track. When all else fails you know you can’t overspend because you can’t come up short on something you feel totally responsible for.
Giving Helps Keep You Accountable
Alongside responsibility comes accountability. When you commit to giving to a charity, you now have a clear marker for whether or not you actually accomplished your goals. Were you able to make your contribution this month, this week or this year?
When you’re regularly giving to a charity you believe in, whether or not you stick to your budget not only affects you but it affects others as well. It’s a lot easier to drift off track when the only person who will be negatively affected is “future you.”
Further if the cause you’re giving to is something local, you may even know people who work in the organization. If that’s the case you’ll really have accountability, in the form of actual people who will probably be polite but disappointed if your plan falls through.
Giving Provides a Challenge
One of the best ways to discipline your budget is to add challenges to it. These give you a goal to overcome that can hold your focus and force you to stick to your plans.
Giving is a great option for that challenge. Not only will it encourage you to work towards a goal, it will also contribute something good to the world. It’s really a win-win.
You can get creative with this and set long term goals on how much you want to be able to give in the future. This can provide fuel for not only maintaining your current budget but increasing the amount of revenue you’re bringing in.
This could even end up encouraging you to get more involved in the charities in your local area. The more involved you are in the given cause, the more seriously you’ll want to take a challenge surrounding it.
Giving to a Worthy Cause Stimulates Motivation
A more altruistic reason giving can help you develop your discipline, is that it can become a source of motivation. Especially once you’ve found a cause you truly believe in. Your belief alone may be enough to tip the scales of your motivation and make you more likely to take your budgeting seriously.
There are many different causes and charities to give to. Depending on your experiences and what you find to be important, some will get your mind working faster than others. Still, if you look long enough you’re bound to find at least one that is really meaningful to you.
Use that meaningfulness as fuel to properly maintain your budget even in your weakest moments. If you remind yourself that you can make a difference on an issue you feel is important, you can really ignite that intrinsic motivation to push forward.
Giving Allows You to Measure How Much Discipline You Have
It’s important to continue setting your giving goals even if you aren’t always achieving them. This is because the frequency at which your giving plans fall through or work out is a good indicator of whether or not you’re getting better with your budgetary discipline.
If you find that you’re falling short more often than not, it may be time to adjust your approach. Different people are motivated by different things. For example, if you’ve been planning to give on your own and failing, you may find that adding an accountability partner is just the motivation you need.
In anycase, you should use your success or failure in giving as a way to track just how disciplined you are with your budgeting.
How Do You Incorporate Giving Into Your Budget?
Now that you’re serious about discipling your budget through giving, you’ll need to know the best ways to incorporate it into your budget. While there’s not really a right or wrong way to start figuring giving into your budget, there are some tried and true methods that will give you a boost.
Remember, as long as you’re meeting your saving goals and keeping up to date on your obligations, whichever methods you’ve chosen to incorporate with are the right ones for you.
So, how exactly do you incorporate giving into your budget and are there ways you make the process more conducive to disciplining your spending?
Organize Your Budget
First things first, you need to organize your budget if you haven’t already. The very fact that you may need to revisit or visit this process, will boost discipling your budget in and of itself.
You really want to be looking at where your money is going now and how you might need to move things around in order to fit giving into the budget. If you’ve been using something like the 50-30-20 rule for budgeting (50% to obligations, 30% to wants, 20% to savings), you’ll need to decide where to draw the giving money from.
With that method for example, you could further divide the wants category into two percentages. One percentage that goes towards your typical wants–entertainment, activities, travel–and another that is specifically for giving.
Choose What Percent of Your Money Will Go to Giving
Setting a fixed percentage you plan to give from your budget is crucial to developing discipline and giving consistently. If you just wait until the end of the month and then try to give from whatever you have left over, you aren’t going to be consistent and you probably won’t stick to it for very long.
With a fixed percent on the other hand, you can treat it the same way you do your other financial obligations. You can’t say, “I think I’ll only pay some of my bills this week because I want to go out to eat every night,” because there is a required amount you need to pay first. You just have to impose that same kind of fixed “bill” on yourself in order to remain disciplined with giving.
Choose How Often You Want to Give
This goes hand in hand with choosing what percent you want to give. Many of the problems with not doing it are actually the same. If you don’t have fixed times, you’re likely to push things back until you completely forget about it.
It’s like how so many people say they’re going to start going to the gym or start a diet but don’t really do it. Maybe they have small spurts where they start doing it for a few days but they never stick to it. The reason they never actually get going is because to them they are always going to start “tomorrow” and not on a specific date.
In budgeting for giving it works the same way. If you don’t have set intervals to give you’re likely to do it once or twice then slowly forget about it. Instead, you need to pick a specific date to start giving and specific times to continue throughout the year.
Having that specific date feeds into the responsibility and accountability we discussed previously. Now you can’t just say “tomorrow” until it slips away from your mind. Instead you know that on so and so date, you must have this money ready to go for whatever cause you’re contributing to.
Consider Giving More Seasonally
Another way to incorporate giving into your budget is to plan bigger charitable donations seasonally. Maybe during Christmas time you will spend extra time volunteering and you’ll pick a charity you don’t normally give to that helps give presents to kids in low income households.
If you’ve started to waver in your regular weekly or monthly giving, that seasonal commitment may be what you need to shock you back on track. This not only cultivates more discipline in your budgeting but it also helps you incorporate giving into your yearly budget itself.
Consider Automating Your Donations
Now-a-days many charities and worthy causes will allow you to set up donations that automatically come out of your account on a monthly or annual basis. If you feel like you need a little bit of extra motivation to incorporate giving into your budget, this is a great way to get it.
It’s going to be a lot more frustrating to have to go in and cancel a payment than it would be to just decide not to donate one particular month. In a moment when you’re fighting a strong temptation to overspend, it may be just the thing you need to stop yourself.
Automatic payments therefore, won’t just further incorporate giving into your budget, they will solidify them there. At first you’ll be sticking to the budget because it’s inconvenient not to, but over time you’ll develop the discipline necessary to keep your course even if there isn’t an extra hassle involved in doing so.
Pick a Local Charity You Can Volunteer For
You might be asking yourself what volunteering has to do with budgeting? Well, if you have a local cause you’re supporting and you try to physically go there—even if it’s only every once in a while—your commitment to staying on budget so you can afford to give will almost certainly increase.
You can ensure you incorporate giving into your budget when you have a real connection to what you’re giving to.
For some, the time commitment to do this may be too much given an already hectic schedule. That’s okay. Still, if you can do anything to make the cause real to you—from just going online and looking at the results of a given charity to participating yourself—you will be more likely to incorporate giving long term.
Consider Adapting Your Giving to the Zero Based Budgeting
Zero based budgeting is a budgeting method many people have found to be useful for cultivating discipline. It essentially says that there shouldn’t be a single penny unaccounted for in your budget when all is said and done.
Applying giving to this rule will help keep you on track and in control of how much money you have going out and in what direction. It will also make it easier to resist putting off that giving because you already know where every penny you spend is going. There’s no tricking yourself into thinking you have more money than you really do because something you want popped up.
So Really, How Does Giving Help Discipline My Budgeting?
Giving is one of the most productive ways you can go about increasing your budgetary discipline. It forces you to reevaluate your current spending in order to make way for the new. It also forces you to take a deeper look into the organizations you give your money to, when you’re trying to pick the right causes.
Really the core reason why giving helps discipline your budget more than other things you might plan for, is the fact that it comes with greater responsibility. When you’ve pledged or just regularly given a certain amount in the past, you’re more likely to feel pressure to live up to that amount in the future. In order to fulfil that responsibility, you will have to stay on budget.