My wife and I recently went away for a weekend wedding in NJ. Now the more veteran budgeters would say something like: “Well awesome Paul thats great that you and your wife were able to budget for that and all of the ancillary costs while still aggressively paying down your debt! Great Job!” Well that isn’t the case here, we’re still rolling with the punches (shout out YNAB*) and learning to “read between the lines” of our expenses.

That’s what really gets us right? Its hardly ever the “Friend’s Wedding Gift”, it’s the “Oh shoot, we have to pay the dog sitter so our fur children are alive when we return” expenses. The ones between the lines.

So here’s what I did when I came to the realization that we hadn’t budgeted for $100 of in-home dog-sitting, one day before we were scheduled to leave for Jersey: Went to the coin jar. Thats the big reveal! Glad you stayed right? Hey at least you didn’t have to wait through a commercial!

Right around when Kristen and I got engaged, we started saving ALL of our change in a 5 gallon water jug (yeah it may or may not have come from one of our offices, who’s askin’?). In fact we took it even further than just pocket change. Any time I had $1 bills in my wallet at the end of the day, they went in the change bucket. So now that we’re spending hundreds of dollars per month out of our envelopes we’ve just amped that up. Every transaction is rounded up and the change is thrown in the bucket. Personally my “Fun Money” still follows the $1 bill rule and they still go in the bucket. So when I had too much month at the end of the money and didn’t want to pull from our grocery or gas money, I emptied the bucket!

The best part about it was that my local credit union has a free coin counter for members so I just bagged the change up and took my $1 bills with me to the local branch and spun the counter for a few minutes. I walked out of the branch with $125! Phew! Quick money and crisis averted!

Before thinking of the change jar, I was really scrambling. I was on Letgo trying to sell an iPad Mini that nearly 25 buyers had either no-showed or obscenely low-balled me on. I was ready to part with it for $100 when I thought of the honey hole that was just a few feet away from me.

So I guess the take away here is two fold: always be reading in between the lines when creating your monthly budget and always build in a bit of money in a “stuff I forgot to budget for” category for things like this. If you manage to breach both of these safeguards (we are imperfect beings) there’s always money in the water jug.

Paul