Give Every Brick a Job

Zero Based Budgeting Explained, Gamer Edition

If you know me in real life you know that my husband is an avid board gamer. He owns hundreds of board games (that we budgeted for), a fancy gaming table and it's all located in our shared office. I also enjoy games but I'm not quite as enthusiastic as he is. That being said, some of my favorite game types are resource management games. I suspect there's some overlap between my love of budgeting and my appreciation for this particular style of game. If you're not familiar with all the many genres of game out there, resource management games are ones where you have to manage your resources (hmm, this seems obvious...). For example, in the game Everdell you are woodland creatures and you collect things like rocks, sticks and berries and use them to build various building types in your little woodland town. Some other popular resource management games include Terraforming Mars, Splendor, Catan and Ticket to Ride. 

To build a road you need one wood and one brick. To build a settlement you need wood, brick, grain and wool. So if I have only one brick I can use it towards a road or towards a settlement but not both. Similarly if I want to build a city for 2 wheat and 3 ore then I probably shouldn't use one of my only 2 wheat to buy a card. So what I do is I make piles. I have a pile for the city I'm working on and it has 1 wheat and 2 ore so far, and another pile with a wood and a brick for a road I'm waiting to build when I decide where it needs to go. Sorting my resources based on my plans for them really helps me to not double dip where there's overlap in the type of resource needed.

Another thing that's true about Catan and other resource management games is that you don't know at the beginning how many resources you will have. The resources come to you slowly each turn, and what resources you get can change over time as you build different things or just get lucky. So you can't make a full plan at the beginning of the game, your plan has to be adaptable. Each time I get a new resource I decide what to do with it and add it to the relevant pile. So in the example above if I got another wheat I'd add it to my city pile, but if I got a brick I'd either start a new pile for a settlement or a new pile for a second road. 

Sometimes something happens in the game that changes my plan. Maybe I receive different resources than expected, or another player starts building where I want to so I have to block them. So my plan needs to be dynamic and flexible, able to adapt to new circumstances. The temptation might be to just not make a plan so you're the most adaptable but in my experience having a plan and adjusting it is more effective than just constantly winging it. 

Does this sound like budgeting to you yet? You often don't start the month with all your paycheck money, so you decide what to do with what you have and then when you get more you add it to the piles. If you have $1000 in your savings account you can't use it for the $800 car repair and a $500 vacation, that's double dipping.  As life happens you have to adjust your plan to fit the new situation. Your budget should be dynamic so that it's consistently reflecting the best plan in that moment but always ready to adapt to new information.