Our first draft retirement budget took us three evenings at the kitchen table, and by the end of the third one, my wife put her pen down and said, "This isn't a budget. This is a panic attack with column headers."
She wasn't wrong. Every line item had padding. Every padded line item had extra padding on top of it, in case the first layer of padding wasn't enough. We'd built a spreadsheet entirely out of worst-case assumptions stacked on top of each other, and the total at the bottom was a number so large it made retirement feel impossible rather than freeing.
We scrapped it and started over.
Counting the Cost, Honestly
Jesus told a small parable about a man planning to build a tower, and it's stuck with me through this whole process:
“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won't you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?”
Luke 14:28
I used to read that as a straightforward endorsement of careful planning, full stop. And it is that. But notice what the passage doesn't say. It doesn't say build in three extra towers' worth of margin out of anxiety. It says estimate the cost. Honestly. Not the worst version of the cost you can imagine at eleven at night after a bad news cycle.
Our first draft wasn't estimating. It was catastrophizing with a calculator, and I think there's a real difference between the two that I hadn't noticed until my wife named it out loud.
Starting Over
The second draft took longer to build, honestly, because it required something harder than adding padding: it required us to actually agree on realistic numbers and sit with the discomfort of not over-preparing for every conceivable disaster. We had to talk about what we actually believed about God's provision, not just what made us feel safest on paper.
Solomon has a line about this that reads almost like a rebuke of our first draft:
“The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty.”
Proverbs 21:5
Diligent, not anxious. Those aren't the same posture, even though they can look identical from the outside. Both involve spreadsheets, both involve careful numbers. But diligence trusts the process and moves forward. Anxiety keeps adding rows because no amount of padding ever feels like enough. Our first three evenings were anxious. Our fourth and fifth were, I think, actually diligent.
What the Real Budget Looks Like
The version we landed on has real numbers, not padded ones. It has an actual emergency fund, sized reasonably rather than infinitely. It has a giving line at the top instead of the bottom. It has room for the grandkids and for the occasional trip, because a budget built entirely around fear doesn't leave room for joy, and I don't think that's what either of us wants retirement to be about.
It also has an honest line we didn't have in the first draft: a note, right there in the spreadsheet, that says something close to "we don't control all of this, and we're choosing to trust God with the part we don't." That's not a normal thing to write into a budget. My wife insisted on it anyway. I'm glad she did. Every time I open the file, I see it before I see any of the numbers below it.
If your own budget conversations feel more like the panic-attack version than the diligent one, I'd just ask what my wife asked me. Is this actually an honest estimate of the cost, or is it a stack of worst cases wearing a spreadsheet's clothes? Those aren't the same thing, and only one of them, I've found, actually leads to peace at the kitchen table.
God bless,
Paul