How do I handle tight budgets and hard collection choices?

You can run a collection now. What still trips you are the budgets and the hard choices, what to keep, what to let go, what you simply cannot afford to save. Those decisions weigh more than the cataloging ever did, because someone always loses something. That weight is a sign you take the stewardship seriously, not that you are bad at it. There is no budget large enough to keep everything, so the job was never really about avoiding hard choices. It is about making them on purpose, guided by what the collection is for and who it serves, rather than by whichever loss feels sharpest in the moment. A clear principle carries the decisions that emotion cannot. Write down, in a sentence or two, what this collection is actually meant to do and for whom. When a hard choice comes, hold it against that sentence. It will not make the choice painless, but it will make it defensible, to others and to yourself. You are not failing to save everything. You are choosing well with what you have.