How to keep Pet Expenses from wrecking your budget

I’m not just a homeschool mom to three kiddos. I also happen to be a fur mom to two dogs and one feisty barn cat. My family knows firsthand how much of a struggle it can be to pay for pet expenses. We’ve had budgets wrecked and even went into debt once to pay for a pet many years ago.

So how do we pay for our sweet fury loves without going broke (or into debt)?

Sinking Funds

I’ve been preaching the Sinking Fund way of managing money for nearly a decade, and it never fails me.

If you follow me on Instagram, you already know about the drama we had a couple of weeks ago with our kitty, Buttercup. But in case you missed it, I ended up having to rush our kitten to the emergency vet.

After spending nearly $1,000, we still had few answers. And come Sunday after church, my husband, and I had to have a very difficult conversation with our children. Buttercup was suffering horribly, and we still didn’t know why. She was declining, and so we had to tell them that even though we were going to take her to a different emergency vet that afternoon, they needed to understand that she may not be coming home.

Thankfully that emergency vet found the problem (I’ll spare you the details but 🤢 take my word it was gross). And now our kitten is back to her usual feisty self (even though that makes giving her her meds a big challenge. 😂)

So, needless to say, our Pet Sinking Fund is completely drained!

But our budget wasn’t wrecked…

Yes, it sucks that our Pet Sinking Fund is completely dry, but you know what would have sucked even more? If we didn’t have that fund, our household budget or Emergency Fund would have had to pay for that expense. And that’s exactly what has happened to us many times over in years past. We weren’t prepared for something that we should have been prepared for, and boom! Here comes something that completely wrecks our financial plans.

Can we anticipate every issue that will come our way in life? No. But we can prepare as much as possible for the very likely things. It’s very likely if you have a pet that, you will have to take them to the vet. At the very least, for their yearly checkup and shots. But it’s also likely you’ll find yourself at least once in an emergency vet’s office.

Same with kids. If you’re going to allow your kids to participate in extracurriculars, then there’s going to be an expense with that. You may not know exactly how much to the T, but you know that expense exists.

This is why I believe in Sinking Funds so much. They help you offset these expenses. Even if the Sinking Fund doesn’t pay for the entire expense, it can help offset the expense making managing your household budget even easier.

So, if you don’t already use Sinking Funds, what is one Sinking Fund that you need to set up ASAP? Is it a Christmas Sinking Fund (heads up, we’re only 25 weeks away from Christmas!) so you don’t find yourself sinking back into debt this Christmas?

Or would a Kid-Related Sinking Fund be a priority to help offset the costs of Back-to-School, sports, and other related expenses?

There is no right or wrong answer here. Just choose one to set up and start funding it today. Pick a “minimum” balance or “threshold,” as we call it, for that account. So for our Pet Sinking Fund, the minimum balance that we had set for it was $1,500. All that means is that we contributed to that account until we reached that $1,500 mark. Then we paused contributions, and we moved on to funding another Sinking Fund.

So pick the most pressing one for you and make it a goal to get it started this weekend. I promise you, your future self (and bank account) will thank you.