These are excerpts from the author’s book “Deep,” which contains eight of his small books published in the form of Wisdom Literature covering different aspects of life: Facing troublemakers, dealing with pain, personal financial issues, gastronomy, reading, criticizing, inspiring, and feeling always good to go.

Series 3: Pocket – Your Personal Economy.

Week 45: Budget Control

• It’s best to stick to a regular spending plan that covers everything, including your rewards to yourself for any achievement and any incidentals in general.

• No matter how careful you are by nature and diligently controlling your spending, you will find yourself from time to time facing sharp turns that take you outside your plan, including what you dedicated for emergency expenses. Do not panic and try to steady as quickly as possible, whether with austerity measures or by a disciplined withdrawal of your savings just as needed. There will come a time—sooner or later—when you will get back what you lost as long as you haven’t floundered through your financial critical juncture.

• No personal or family budget, or even the budget of an institution or a state, is always staunch. The challenges of any budget often arise from emergency spending requirements, no matter how carefully we calculate them. An emergency does not become an emergency if we can fully and accurately anticipate it.

• You don’t have to be a financial expert to control your budget. Budget control at the personal levels requires more talent and applied skills than complex theoretical knowledge.

• Budget control does not mean spending less but maintaining the spending plan even if the planned spending is huge.

• The challenge of budget control lies primarily in rational spending, not just in abstaining from unplanned and unnecessary spending.

• Like the budget of any official institution, your own budget needs constant periodic reviews and sometimes immediate serious interventions to adjust it in order to prevent a critical deficit.

• A collapsed budget needs more attention to control it than your budget in normal situations does. Do not let your preoccupation with the search for an urgent remedy for the collapsed budget keep you from carefully controlling the available amount, as this may lead to further collapse, which in turn makes the treatment more complicated.

• It is good to come out at the end of the month or the end of the year with a budget surplus, but it is important that this surplus did not come at the expense of a frozen investment that could have been achieved utilizing the surplus if the budget was calculated at the beginning more accurately. In all cases, the lesson learned should be considered to benefit from it in the next budget.

• Lessons learned from your previous budget control experiences will be more useful if you carefully contemplate them not only to avoid past mistakes, but also to anticipate potential challenges and try to avoid them.