Flexible budget

For much of my adolescence, I worked alongside my brother and a couple of friends with a neighbor who was in charge of building sports fields. He would draw up a budget, and based on that, he would pay us for the week's work. Then, with time and experience, we started working for ourselves, and now we were the ones who drew up the budget and directly managed everything involved, from the materials to the time it would take us to complete our work. Without a doubt, this served as a tool for us to plan many things.

As more jobs came in, we became more proficient in understanding the value of what we were doing, to the point where we could reasonably set a fair price for the work without going into too much detail. Obviously, over time we had to update our prices to reflect the cost of materials and tools, but in general, this was not a factor that significantly altered the agreed-upon price. Thus, for each project, the budget was our guide and reference for managing income and expenses based on a specific time frame.

It is known as "working for business," and until recently it was the most viable option for both the worker and those who needed a job. Is it still feasible now? Well, given the unstable economic system in my country, having a budget and working based on time invested is no longer a very reliable guarantee. Practically everything changes in price from one day to the next, and I think I'm even understating it because there are cases where the value of a product changes from morning to afternoon, while everything becomes a frantic race to get the job done as quickly as possible.

This can lead to two things: today you can make a budget for a job, but tomorrow it's no longer the same. I also know people who do a job at a certain price, but in a couple of days it costs less or more, although the trend always makes you see more losses than gains. What used to be a guarantee now seems to be a small shadow that generates anything but security, and many decide not to take advantage of the present but to wait for things to improve so they can invest with more peace of mind. I don't mean to say that budgeting is no longer effective, but the reality is that even with this tool, the changing economy also forces you to make many adjustments on the fly.

It can be said that a budget changes daily. If you make one today for a specific job, tomorrow it will not give you the same balance you thought it would at the beginning. Sometimes many people believe that this adjustment is a strategy to earn more than they should, but the economic system makes it clear that it is not a matter of taking advantage, but rather something normal for such a changing system. Even so, the budget remains an excellent tool, something that in the midst of chaos can help us visualize everything involved in a work project that we want to carry out.