By default, budgeting is boring.

Initially, there may be excitement at gaining control over one's financial life, but in the long run, a successful budget results in repetition, and boredom for all except the most hardcore budgeting nerds. It does not have to.

In nature, resources and opportunities present themselves in small and large cycles, and also randomly. To make a budget less tedious and more interesting, it should mimic these natural rhythms.

For example, let's make an imaginary food budget. Yes, this example comes from my real life, but my real constraint was much lower, and I had the benefit of living in Shanghai at the time. Today, I'll use the maximum level of food stamps where I live in California as a "creative budgeting" restriction. No, not fraudulent, just fun and varied.

The naive, uniform daily budget is $9.70 ($291 / 30). Using this figure, you can eat well enough, but you'll never truly feast in a day-to-day comparison, and if you buy food in bulk to stretch your money, you'll likely eat the same things every day without a break in the monotony.

If you'd like to feast once in a while, you can try the following budget:

This lowers the spend of the average day to $8.29, saving $1.41 per day. It also increases your maximum budget day by over $5. Once per month, you can splurge the additional approximately $42 on a feast. Steak night, perhaps, or wild caught salmon, or whatever your heart desires. Ten pints of Ben & Jerry's maybe, if you're a degenerate sugar addict (Walmart price).

Every day, you can look forward to Wednesdays and Saturdays, and all month you can look forward to your feast.

The constrained budget on Mondays and Thursdays should breed creativity. When I've used this kind of budget in the past, I consider leftovers, pantry items and condiments fair game on such days (free for the sake of the budget, though they cost money in the past, when I was abiding by the budget). You can enjoy classic poor food like ramen with an egg (and leftover green onion!), or rice and beans. The possibilities exist, and with a constrained budget for a single day, you'll have renewed incentive to find them.

This pattern can apply to some other forms of budgeting too, though the daily nature of eating makes this strategy particularly well suited to a food budget. I'd love to hear about your budgeting tricks, so drop them in the comments.