Budget Better Bonus Series | Step 3: Plan for the Future

But if you're like me who has been personally victimized by the word budget, I spent years making these perfect budgets and never being able to spend in the way that I budgeted. I knew what was coming in, I made the budget to dictate what was going out, and for some reason I couldn't do the things I said I wanted to do. And that cycle at month after month created a lot of guilt and shame around budgeting. So even that was before my husband and I paid

off seventy eight thousand dollars of debt. While we were on that debt payoff journey, we used a budget every month and stuck to it very strictly, and I came out of that having shame and guilt about spending money. Even when I budgeted money for something that I had, I felt guilty spending on it because it wasn't the quote unquote most efficient or best way to spend that money according to financial experts.

And I think sometimes reshifting the language can help us to understand the purpose of it a little bit better. So you'll hear us still use the word budget because everyone knows what that means.

based spending a lot on this podcast. It's essentially what our entire book, By What You Love Without Going Broke is about, and what we mean by our values and how we want to spend on That is, recognizing the core values that exist for most of us, while also knowing that many times we can get after these values without spending money. So we'll kind of connect all these dots here in this quick little episode, but for a refresher for all of us. We have found that for

the majority of us, we share common core values. The things that are most important to us can be summarized in the four FS. So family, faith, friends, and fulfilling work. We love a literation, we love a good f word. And so what we find is that most of us, with all of our spending, are spending with our energy, are spending of our time, our spending of our emotional, mental, physical resources, spending of our money often goes towards these areas.

That usually what we most want more of is meaningful time with friends and family. We want to be able to engage in faith practices and spirituality that is life giving to us. We want to engage our hands and our minds in fulfilling work, and being able to make a plan for our money and our time around these things can be a really helpful place to start and then fill in the gaps with all of the math.

So we love to start here. And when it comes to a spending plan, of course, you know the ninety day transaction inventory and the thirty day No Spend challenge is going to help you to identify how am I spending time in these four F categories? What is getting me more of that? Where can I see gaps? Where could I get more fulfilling interactions with these four fs will be where we begin and then start identifying. Okay, then with the money that I do have, how can I allocate.

self care, that sort of thing. And then finally we have fulfilling work, so passion projects, continuing education, all of this stuff. And then we have like a miscellaneous because eighty percent of our expenses are going to be able to fall under that, but there's going to be some that don't, So then we've got a miscellaneous So instead of having just this small miscellaneous category and these all these other big specific like tiny specific categories, we've got

just big groups. It makes it much more flexible. And so the second way it changes it is that we are not just budgeting money in this spending plan. We are budgeting how we spend all of our resources, mainly our money and our time. So we also want to put our time in there because there's a lot of ways when we are first pursuing our higher needs and we can do it with time, we can do it creatively without money. Then we feel the need to impulse

spend or pursue these things with money less frequently. So we are creating a more flexible, open spending plan, and we are not just budgeting our money. We're also budgeting our time and sometimes other resources too, so like mental energy, physical space. Getting creative with all of your resources and seeing how like I want to budget like part of my time and part you know, my living room to have coffee with a friend at my house. That's just

like a high level example. But you get creative and how you do this, and it is going to feel much less restrictive than the old way of budgeting.

So it could even be a separate document the things that we know we want to be doing with our family and friends and with our spiritual practices, so that we can kind of know, I'm going to get some fulfillment of my needs here, so that here's where I can then put some of my money into.

way depending on who you are. But again, like Jill said, you could also have a separate one because maybe you are married to a person or in a relationship with a person who is more flexible and you're more categorical, and maybe you need the same budget presented two different ways to make it make sense. That is fantastic and great and can be done.

of us. What we bring home month to month can shift. So we are going to recommend creating a spending plan based off of your lowest months. The other months will just be bonus and you can allocate the extras in the ways that are going to be necessary for you. But take into consideration what am I bringing in, what am I earning each month, and how do I then want to spend that. So some of that, of course is going to be on your basic necessities, your bills

and your utilities and your housing. What is left over and how can I filter that in to these higher values, and what ways can my discretionary spending align with the goals that I have to get at these four f's in more fulfilling ways? And how am I also considering my investing in savings goals? So we're still considering having a fully funded emergency fund and you know, other goals

of paying down debt and investing. We love to encourage you to put investing on autopilot, so this is not something that needs to be taking up a ton of time and energy for you. Your mind doesn't need to be going to this constantly. But you've been contributing monthly automatically to a roth ira. You're having contributions taking out of your paycheck for R four oh one k. You're

getting the match. So that's something that we definitely need to look at, but it doesn't need to be a part of our spending plan that is taking a lot of our time and energy to think about.

may just be seasonal too. It may I need to take time and make less income right now so that I can do some other experiential job or learning so that in two years I increase my capability of earning. But the dead I take on doesn't negate that increase. So again it's looking at the math for spending. We already talked about that, and then also for investing or saving your emergency fund, whichever one you're on, is when you put that on autopilot, you don't need to budget

as much time. You really only need to budget time once a year to reallocate to make sure you're in a good alignment with your risk tolerance.

be setting with my habit and impulse spending and just all of my different types of spending. What goals should I be having with some negotiation efforts on bills? And where do I want to be seeking ways to lower some of my expenses? And where are there categories where I see, oh, I'd love to increase this. What do I know is coming up for the future that can inform the ways in which I want to set money aside.

What I set aside into different sinking funds year over year will change based on what's coming up that year, my goals for that year, who I plan to be seeing, how I plan to be meeting some of my family

and friend core values. So all of that. That's the reason we talk about doing these things beforehand, because this is just going to be the implementation then for the skill set and what to expect with this part of our Budget Better Bonus series when we're planning for the future, I think we can expect as usual for it not to go perfectly, and that is okay. In fact, it's great when we're not perfect, because we can learn from those things, and we can have grace and permission on ourselves,

and we can create maybe even more flexibility. Maybe we realize with the next month spending plan, I am much more of a spontaneous person than I even realize. And how do I include that then in my budget? Where can I make shifts so that I can have more room for some of these last minute activities or invites that I love engaging in. But I think what we can also expect here is that it will go in tandem that our plan will also help us to refine our skill set, and our skill set of spending will

help to inform the plan. That we will get better at this over time. But expect to have to continue to keep a regular pulse on this, especially in the beginning that we are checking this potentially with every pay period, definitely at least every month that we're looking at our transactions, we're looking at our plan, we're considering our four fs and what needs to continue to be refined.

it and feel full. So that is happening January twenty ninth, So head to buy what youlovebook dot com to preorder that and submit your proof of purchase so that you can get in on that Live with Us.

So those are my categories for my discretionary spending. Of course, I've got you know, my bills and insurances and all of that, but as far as discretionary goes, that's what it looks like. So miscellaneous includes like everything from paper products to clothing to just whatever I want to buy

that month. That kind of hits that need of spontaneity and being able to kind of be a little bit flexible with what those things look like, and recognizing that I had a pretty high miscellaneous plan kind of month

over month. Most of this is still carrying over, believe it or not, from when we were doing renovations, and we've been done renovations for eight to nine months now, and I did use our miscellaneous or our renovations sinking fund for that, but I still kind of kept it a little bit higher so that we could kind of buy you know, the extra handles or the cock or you know, kind of the smaller things that I wasn't going to be pulling out of our renovation sinking fund.

Now we're just not buying a lot. I don't need the amount of money that I have allocated, but what I do need is to reincrease our housing sinking fund. So we are still recovering from the hurricanes that hit us in October, and while we've gotten some of our projects done, we've got more projects coming up. Of needing

to redo the roof on our garage. We'd like to add stucco to the exterior of the house, which would just help to make it more water proof, because this is where our minds are at now, how to protect ourselves from future flooding. So needing to increase that sinking fund. So making this plan to reduce miscellaneous spending so that I can allocate more to the sinking fund and hopefully within the next few months be ready to start moving on the next projects for the house. What about you?

that's not the way people should start doing it. Investing should be an autopilot. We had we have a very good nest egg right now and so we can afford to like do it the other way around. But we were able to max out last year's twenty twenty three's IRA kind of like at the last minute where we had stopped right but then we were like, okay, we check in, we do have the money. Let's just you know, finish it off and max it out. So we're going

to do something again similarly to that. I don't think we will max it out this year, but we could I think possibly for the twenty twenty five year.

let us know we've reviews. If you liked this that that would be helpful for us as well. This rounds out the bonus series, so there won't be more, but we will continue with our regularly scheduled full length episodes through the rest of the week. So enjoy that and we'll see you in the new.