3 Ways Planning/Budgeting Helps You

The plans of the diligent surely lead to advantage, but everyone who is hasty comes surely to poverty.  Proverbs 21:5

I love this verse when counseling about planning/budgeting, and how it protects us and what happens when we don’t budget.

1. Planning or budgeting helps to lay a foundation for us to depend on in times of need.  A financial emergency happens to everyone.  When we don’t have a savings though or plan, that emergency turns into a catastrophe that sometimes can’t be recovered from.
2. When we don’t have a financial foundation and get into an emergency we don’t think logically.  We only think about solving the problem in front of us. That problem is to pay for the emergency at hand.  This illogical thinking means that emotions take over (fear), and we tend to make bad decisions.  Budgeting will prevent us from acting on emotions and instead use a preplanned attack that won’t hurt us in the long run.
3. When we make emotional decisions we turn to poor short term instruments to pay for emergencies because we are not thinking rationally.  We use things like high interest credit cards, lines of credit, payday loans, title loans, pawn shops, or even worse.  Many people use these instruments because they fail to make a plan/budget.

God wants us to depend on Him.  That is really hard when we fall into a financial bind.    Planning/budgeting helps to prevent financial strife.  That does not mean that we can’t fall into financially hard times, because God might want that for us as well (It brings us closer to Him).  But, that does not mean we should not plan or budget for our future.