Welcome back for Day FIVE of the 5 Day Budgeting Makeover Series!!!
We’ve done a lot of work over the last few days; work that you’ve probably never done when creating a budget before. This is the work that makes or breaks your budget, so if you have fallen behind, take time today or tomorrow to get caught up. These videos are going to be available for you to watch over the next few days to give you an opportunity to get caught up. Come and ask your questions (in the Facebook group). Let me help you iron out the wrinkles to make sure that this sticks. In this final lesson, we are going to wrap things up.
We have talked about making sure that your budget is full of facts and that you are not living in a fantasy land looking out the window at those unicorns.
We’ve talked about how important it is to understand the difference between needs and wants. We want to budget for our needs and only for our wants if we can afford to have our wants included. Otherwise, we want to put those into a future you category and save up for them.
We talked about the concept of future you. That future you needs money too. In order for the budget to work, we need to take care of future you. We need to make sure that the expected unexpecteded’s are accounted for and that your goals and dreams are put in place in the budget so that they actually happen.
We also talked about the concept of the lifestyle budget. How much money you can afford to spend on a monthly basis without screwing it all up. What’s the point of creating a budget if you don’t actually plan on following it? Or even that you can’t follow? We want this whole process to set you up for absolute financial success.
So now that we have covered all of that, we are going to talk quickly about how often you need to budget, review and revise the plan that you’ve created. Well, you need to keep doing it until it’s a well oiled machine. Over the next several days, I want you to keep revising the numbers and figure out what you can do to reduce your expenses and increase your income if your numbers are not falling in to the place that you want it to to give your future you enough and your lifestyle category enough.
Now, moving forward, the way you’re going to keep this budget alive is with a monthly review. At the beginning or end, depending on how your schedule goes, of every month, I want you to go and plan out the following month. Make sure that you check out the calendar and there are no new unexpected events coming up that you can’t afford somewhere. Let’s make sure that we know how many paycheques we are going to have this month, how much income is coming in. I want you to take the time each and every month. Most of your expenses and most months your income is going to be the same, unless you have a variable income. We will have a conversation about that separately if that applies to you. If that doesn’t apply to you, each and every month are going to be very similar. Why are they going to be similar? Because your wants and your day to day spending is coming out of that lifestyle amount, so knowing exactly what you have coming up at the beginning of the month that is going to be spent from the lifestyle amount is very very important. Okay? So each month, I would expect this to take you no more than 15 minutes. Give yourself half an hour so that you can sit down with a cup of tea or a glass of wine and look forward at the next month. Make sure you have a conversation with your spouse or your kids to make sure that everybody is involved and everyone is on the same page before moving into the month. Make sense?
You need to review your budget on a monthly basis AND any time your financial situation changes, or you add a new goal to FUTURE YOU.
Lindsay Plumb, Founder of the Pretty Money Club
We also want to go and review the budget any time that our expenses are going up or down our income is going up or down. We want to review it if we have any financial changes. We want to come back and look at this budget before making financial decisions. So… no buying a puppy or a new car before looking at the budget. This is your road map to success. It’s not some numbers that you’ve thrown on a piece of paper to forget about in the future. This is the road map. This is where you come, this is your GPS to find your financial success. So come back here on a regular basis and review your budget when income and expenses change, or when you want to make a purchase or add a goal to your future.
Your budget is your road-map, your GPS, to financial success.
Lindsay Plumb, Founder of the Pretty Money Club
I hope that you learned everything that was missing. I hope this budget now has given you an opportunity to really see that your goals can happen. I hope that this gives you some piece of mind that you have enough money. I hope that this eliminates some of that stress and maybe even fighting in your house around who spends what. Money does not have to be so stressful. I am here to support you and if you’ve enjoyed this series, I want to encourage you to come and ask some questions about the Pretty Money Club. We do our budget on a monthly basis together. We also take on a different topic every single month to increase our financial literacy, to increase our clarity on our goals and our understanding around finances in general. So this if this is something that interests you, please come and ask me! I would LOVE to welcome you into the Pretty Money Club if this is something that you would like to include in your life moving forward. Thank you so much for taking the time to trust me, for implementing this system, and for doing the work. I can’t wait to see what you can do with it. Bye!!!
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