I am once again tweaking my zero based budget as my financial situation requires. I have a few more changes happening in my life and I expect a few more to come up rapidly in the next few months. This means that I will need to make some big changes in the way I live and in the way that I manage my money.

I made a few small budget tweaks in December last year and now I have to make a few more. The main tweak is that I have had to reduce the total budget and especially focus on the discretionary areas. In my old budget I treated savings like an expense so that I could do things like fund my emergency fund and save up for my dream car.

I have now decided to reduce the amount I put in savings because I will need to rely more on the cash that I actually do have. I will not be saving anything for a little while so I have reduced that budgeted amount to zero and stopped all the transfers to my ING sub accounts for now.

Over the next few months I will be looking at reducing the total budget even more by either reducing categories or eliminating them completely until I get a bare minimum that I can survive on for the next few months.