Budget Beater: Did You Blow Your Budget On Gear This Year?

There’s something about having a new stick in the bag, or even better, a whole bag of new sticks, to get the practice juices flowing for the winter. Of course, if you are anything like me, you want to hit the range any time you possibly can anyways, so having a few new clubs to hit just makes matters worse. But that’s not the point of this post, it’s more about what happens when you blow your golf budget out of the water and you’re not sure how to recover for next year? Let’s start with a few basics and work forward.

1) It starts with a budget – Make sure you always make out a personal budget. Factor in everything you could want to be doing and then decide how much you want to golf. Let’s just say you make $5000 a month, and 25% of that goes to your home, 10% goes to insurance, 10% goes to cars, 5% goes to other expenses. Then you have 10% to food, 10% to utilities and 10% to other mandatory needs. The other 20% goes to taxes, which leaves not much money for anything else. Let’s just say you have a total of $75 a month to spend on golf at that point, so you need to do one of two things – 1 create a separate “golf” account at your bank with it’s own debit card or just use cash to pay for your tee times. Option 2 is always nicer, but some courses require a credit or debit card to make a tee time, so having a card for golf is always a nice way to do things.

2) If you blow it one month, don’t cover it with the next – So you have a beautiful January and you sneak out for an extra round, blowing you $75 budget by $30. What ever you do, don’t take that from February’s budget. Find a way to cover that $30 without robbing from the future. If you know you have two rounds a month for the whole year, you can base your play off that. If you change directions from that, make sure you have the money available for the extra round and do it. Never steal a future round just to sneak in an extra now. Give up things like an extra dinner out or coffee for a week and see if you can make up that $30’s that way.

3)  Vow to pack your snacks for the year – $4 for a hot dog and $2.50 for a soda. It seems innocent enough, but if you are playing 24 rounds of golf this year, you’ll be spending over $150 on snacks at the course. While that may not seem like much, that’s 5 rounds at $30 a piece or 2 months of your golfing budget spent on hot dogs and drinks. Grabbing a reusable water bottle and some lower cost energy bars (they usually have them on sale for a buck or less) will really stretch your dollar further.

4) Stop shopping for a 1/2 stroke – Proper fitting gear is all you need to golf well. Some time back, I purchased a set of very inexpensive cavity back irons to see if they would help my game or not. The $139 I dropped on the full set was a fun experiment, but it didn’t get me very much data. I hit the ball around the course and shot a 78. My Tour Blades went around the same course that afternoon and shot a 74. Don’t think that you can go out and spend more money and get that much better performance. Top grade equipment is all made from the best materials you can find, so the longevity of your investment is safe.

5) It all ends with a budget – Regardless of how much money you blew this year on what ever you blew it on, next year is a whole new year. Don’t fret over what you spent in the past. That money is gone and isn’t going to come back. On the flip side, looking to next year is crucial. If you want to stick to playing golf on a budget, you need to play golf on a budget. If you have $50 a month to play, that’s fine. If you have $200 a month to play, that’s fine too. Just find a number that doesn’t require you to get out a credit card every time you make a move and you will be winning the battle.

The big picture is what’s important and playing golf on a budget means that you aren’t going to spend money you don’t have on rounds that are gone all too quickly. Create a budget, shop for deals and get the most out of the money you have. From saving on balls to tee times, I’ll keep bringing you more ways to save money while you play. You just need to make the best decision for your budget on what makes the most sense for your wallet and your game.