When you think about future expenses, what feeling comes up first?

Conversation Tiller Tuesday
1

Let’s talk about something that can bring up a lot of emotions: the future.

Managing daily bills is one thing, but thinking about money for expenses down the road can feel different. Whether it’s a surprise car repair, saving for the holidays, or planning for a big life goal, these moments can feel abstract and sometimes overwhelming.

This brings us to this week’s Tiller Tuesday question:

When you think about future expenses, what feeling comes up first?

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Anxiety? Dread? Hope? Confusion? Maybe a mix of everything?

There are absolutely no wrong answers. The first step toward gaining clarity and confidence with your money is understanding how you feel about it right now.

Thank you for sharing openly. Your honesty helps everyone in this community feel less alone on their own money journey.

-Alice
Tiller Evangelist

Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn

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I turn 49 this year… future expenses … is retirement creeping up and my oldest kids will be graduating college soon… so my feeling is “it’s going to be different.”

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3

Anxiety, but less than a few years ago before we started really budgeting and carefully mapping out future expenses.

Since I took over the bulk of the finances, I’ve mapped out a couple of things:

  1. ongoing/continuous expenses that will remain reasonably steady (mortgage, insurance, phone bill, etc.);
  2. fluctuating expenses that we need (utilities, groceries, home supplies, gas);
  3. large expenses that are predictable, but only come up once a year or so; and
  4. how much of that will cost us in the next 6-12 months against our expected income.

I have a much better sense of those large expenses that come up every year or 6 months now. We often were not accounting for those and get hit with a big bill that we were having increasing trouble paying. Using the Savings Budget probably in a way that it wasn’t wholly intended, I fund various digital envelopes on a monthly ongoing basis and some are comment-marked “DO NOT TOUCH” so we know that the money will be there when it actually needs to get spent. Things like car tabs and bar dues are not as nerve-wracking anymore because we’re projecting them and saving for them rather than just focusing on cashflow each month.

I’m still having some panic attacks these days because we just started our second child in the same private school as our first and we got some reduced financial aid this year from last year, so budgeting for our kids’ education just got a lot more expensive and there’s currently a shortfall by the end of the year. We should have some additional income that I’ll need to allocate to the envelope to even out the difference, but I’m biting my nails a bit until we actually get it.

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Thanks for this @pkrug539, this is really great advice. I’d love to interview you about this if you’re up to it. Email me alice@tiller.com :slight_smile: