Transcription
For [Music]. Who, I'm just looking at the viewfinder for the first time and I feel like I am giving egg energy today, like hard B egg energy. I do apologize, my hair is just not playing. Buo, that's such an influence of thing to say. Don't mind my appearance, I apologize, don't look at me. But like, you're going to be looking at me for the next 20, 30 minutes. That's just the fact of the matter. It is what it is, you know. This is me, take it or leave it.
Anyway, how are we all? Hope you guys are all doing well, having yourselves a good day. I'm so excited for this video. I feel like it's been a while since I've T, since I can't speak, since I've sat down and filmed just like a chatty money budgeting personal finance video. So I'm so excited for this one. This is honestly probably one of my most requested videos of all time. And as your self-appointed budgeting bestie, I feel obliged to share with you guys how I budget, how I set up my budget, how I budget for monthly and quarterly bills, how we budget weekly, fortnightly, monthly income or variable income, a different bank account set up, and just like general budgeting savings tips. I want to say budgeting one more time, honestly. So yeah, buckle up, it's probably going to be a very chatty video. Grab your beverage of choice. I'm just on the waters today, guys, but if I had my way, you know what I'd be drinking? Yeah, grab your tea, coffee, wine, your beverage of choice, and let's get into it. I'm so excited.
Also, be sure to subscribe if you're new here and give this video a thumbs up. It really helps my channel out. I really, really appreciate it. I do a lot of vlogs and lifestyle content, as well as personal finance videos. I love talking about money and opening up the conversation around personal finance, especially for young women. I really believe knowledge is power, and there's a reason it's not taught in schools. The government—I sound like a conspiracy theorist, I promise I'm not—but the government, the banks, they're all capitalizing on our lack of knowledge. So here we are, opening up the conversation, making money less of a taboo topic.
First things first, you want to figure out what your tool of choice is. I personally use the Yearly 2.0 spreadsheet from Centy. I always have a link down below, along with my discount code. I just love this spreadsheet. It has monthly tabs, and then it also has a yearly tab as well. So at the end of the year, I can go back and look at how much money we made, what we spent, just really gives a nice cohesive overview of all of our finances. It also has a savings and debt tracker, and you can track your net worth on here as well, so lots of cool features.
I've actually downloaded a fresh spreadsheet, uh, so we've got a blank one that we can set up together, and I'll show you guys how I do that. But yeah, whether it's a spreadsheet or something else, just figuring out what your preferred tool of choice is, is I personally prefer, and I would recommend if you're just starting out with budgeting, to use something that requires you to manually track everything. I still do this now, even the I, I could download an app that does it all for me, and I do, like my bank does that anyway, it kind of categorizes my spending. But for me, manually inputting all of my transactions every single day holds me so much more accountable. I'm so much more aware of where my money is going versus it just coming out of my account. There's just something about typing it in; it really forces you to reflect and figure out if that is a necessary purchase, especially if your goal is to save money.
And honestly, the best place to start is to just start. I know that sounds so simple and easy, but when you're just getting into budgeting or trying to take control of your finances, it can feel really overwhelming. My biggest tip is to just track for one month. Just go through, don't even set a budget, but just start inputting all of your transactions throughout the month, and then you've kind of got your baseline to work off of. Or if you do have the time—I know I'm like this, once I set my mind on something and I'm motivated to do something, I want to do it now—so if you do have the time, going back and looking at your last month of spending, um, is a really good place to start. One to three months is ideal, 'cause it gives you like a nice range, not every month is going to be the same, obviously. And then from there, you can identify different areas that you can cut back in.
I don't think it's reasonable—I know all these finance bros preach about, you know, only eating beans and rice and not spending a single cent of money on yourself if you're in debt or you don't have a fully funded emergency fund, which is so unrealistic, I'm sorry. If you're in debt, like you are still a human, and you're not going to get out of debt any faster by doing that. I just don't think it's sustainable, especially if you're new to this, to completely go cold turkey and cut out all fun spending. Like, that is unsustainable. It's almost like a crash diet, you know what I mean? It's like a crash diet for your budget. It may work for a little while; there will come a time where you will slip up, you'll feel like a failure, and then you'll just be like, "it," and just spend willy-nilly. You'll look back on all your spending and be like, "Oh my gosh, what have I done?" and then start that cycle all over again.
Everyone's going to have different money values, and I think identifying the things that you're willing to spend money on is really important, um, and then cutting back in the areas that you don't care about as much.
Also, along with this, with setting up your budget, you want to figure out what your financial goals are, whether that's saving for a house deposit or saving for a wedding, paying off your car loan, whatever your financial goal is, working that out. I think having a financial goal really gives you a lot of purpose. Keeping that purpose at the center of everything you do is so important. I call it my "why," like, why am I doing all of this? Why am I sacrificing or cutting back in certain areas of my budget? It's because I want to achieve this goal. And I've talked about this before, but anytime I would go to make a purchase, especially when we were in the midst of saving for our house deposit and saving for our wedding, I would ask myself, like, "Is this a necessary purchase? Is this a want or is this a need? Will this help me reach my financial goal?" And nine times out of ten, it wasn't going to. And just taking that time to check in with myself really brought me back to reality. I saved a lot of money by asking myself that simple question. So keeping your financial goal in mind and figuring out what your "why" is and why you want that, like, it's one thing being like, "Oh, my goal is to save for a house deposit." Why is it your goal to save for a house deposit? Like, what is your motivation behind that? That is your "why," and that is what will keep you motivated and keep you focused.
And then from there, it's honestly all about tracking and updating your spreadsheet every single day. Every single day. I find if I leave it more than a day or two, I just feel out of touch with where my money is going, and then it becomes like a big thing; it becomes a little bit overwhelming. If you do it every day, like, it will literally take you two minutes, if that. I can make adjustments in real time and turn things around versus getting to the end of the month and being like, "Oh, I spent $1,000 on eating out this month. I had no idea."
So I will show you guys the spreadsheet that I use and kind of how I use it, how I set it up. As I said, it's the Yearly 2.0 spreadsheet from Coop Plenty. It looks like this when you download it. So they have a step-by-step video tutorial. They also have an Instagram with some really helpful videos as well, and there's a step-by-step on how to actually set it up. So Step One is budget name. So go to annual totals, add the budget name for income, bills, subscriptions, expenses, savings, and debt. And then all of this will appear in the monthly tabs. And then it will look a little something like this. This is my current spreadsheet for 2024. So we've got both of our paychecks. We both get paid, or we used to get paid, fortnightly. Then I've got my business income, any miscellaneous income, and then I also have a third income line 'cause there's some months where we'll get paid three times depending on our pay cycle. Then we've got our bills, subscriptions, all of our variable expenses I keep in here, savings, and debt. Once you've filled everything out and tracked everything, you'll get these beautiful little graphs. It's all very interesting. I cannot believe this was January; this feels like a lifetime ago.
So really, when it comes to setting up the spreadsheet, it's all about this annuals total tab, 'cause that is what will show up in your month budget. Um, God, it's been so long since I've done this. Nick's paycheck one, Nick's paycheck two. And now I don't work a nine-to-five job anymore. I quit my job back in February, so I don't have a usual paycheck. I'm just going to call this business income, um, and it's variable. You can add as many different lines in here as you want. So if you get paid monthly, obviously you just have one. If you get paid weekly, you'd have at least four or five. Hello, puppet, are you going to help me? Yeah, should we do Mabel's income? Oh, I can't reach, darling. You have to go down. And even though it's a monthly spreadsheet, it will carry over. So if I put in my actual paycheck, say Nick's paycheck was $2,000, that will show up here in the left-to-spend part. And if I don't input any transactions into the transaction tracker, this will carry over into February. So it's always carrying over whatever is left over at the end of the month. So it doesn't really matter when you get paid or how often you get paid. I just like to work off a monthly budget 'cause a lot of our bills are monthly. Um, I just find it easier to track that way.
I usually start by listing our quarterly bills. We've got gas, electricity. Add a fun little emoji in there, why not? Keep it lighthearted. Uh, water. Oh, council rates. We've got like our internet, phone bill, car insurance, basically anything that is a set fixed expense. Yeah, that's just kind of an example of the bills that I would have in here.
And then subscriptions, you might have Netflix, um, Apple, Disney Plus. And then just general expenses. So groceries is probably the biggest one. Eating out. I like to break down eating out and takeaway 'cause to me they're two very different things. There's some things that are in a little bit of a gray area. If I go to get frozen yogurt, is that takeaway or is that eating out? I don't know. If I sit down and eat it, is that eating out? It really does depend. So there's some things that are a bit of a gray area. But for us, takeaway is usually like a weekly or fortnightly thing. We'll go and get takeaway food, bring it home, and eat it. Like, that's one of our dinners for the evening. Where eating out is more of an experience, whether that's going out for brunch or going out to dinner. But you really have freedom with this; you can really get as specific as you want with it. So we've got groceries, petrol, home, health, social, which is like hanging out with our friends, coffee, uh, eating out, date night, 'cause that's one of our goals for 2024 is to prioritize date night. So I like to see it on our budget; it's a nice little reminder to prioritize that. Then we've got Mabel, um, entertainment, gifts, books, alcohol, takeaway, ride share, clothing, beauty, miscellaneous, and then travel. So those are an example of some categories.
And then coming down here, we have our savings. Again, depends on what your current savings goals are. So it might be home deposit. For us, we love traveling, so we like to have a travel fund. And even though I'm separating these on the spreadsheet, I don't necessarily have separate accounts for them when it comes to my bank account. This is purely my way of just tracking what that money is for and where that money is going. Then for debt, you might have a car loan, credit card. We do have a credit card now, but I don't include it on here 'cause we just pay it off in full every month, so there's no point. Like, we're not carrying over any debt into the next month. Uh, we include our mortgage on there. Oh, mortgage, mortgage. And that's pretty much it. It's so easy to set up, like one of the most simple templates that I've come across.
And then it's as simple as actually setting your budget. So expected income, let's say $2,500. I would do this at the beginning of every month, um, which if you watch my monthly recaps, you're probably very familiar with this little setup. Business income, I might say $5,000. What I also love about the spreadsheet is you can add in the due dates of things. So if you know that your gas bill comes out on the 7th of every month, which it's probably a quarterly bill, so this is probably not a great example, but like internet, I know it comes out on the 15th of every month, so I can keep track of it that way. I also like to tick things off as I go, whether that's when they're paid or when I transferred that money into our bills account.
So I guess it's probably a good point to explain how our bank accounts are actually set up and how we manage our money. So for us, we have basically two, well, no, three accounts. First one is our bills account. This is an accumulating account, essentially a sinking fund. Every single payday, we will transfer half of what we need to into our bills account to cover for our monthly bills. That way, when the bills come out, there's money just sitting there. We don't have to think about it. We're not accidentally touching that money and spending money that we don't have 'cause we have bills coming out. Like, it is a separate account purely for bills.
So when it comes to payday, I will give May as an example. So $981 is how much we need to set aside for bills. So usually come next payday, 'cause it's the most consistent, we'll transfer half of that amount into the bills account. And I'll come back to how we actually budget for those quarterly bills in a moment. Um, but yeah, we have our bills account, and then we have our offset account. For you, that might be your SA account. Our offset basically acts as our money hub these days. It houses our emergency fund and any other savings we might have. The third thing that we use is a credit card. Now, we recently signed up for one in the last month. Was our first month of using it, and that basically acts as like our spending account. We signed up for one so we could get frequent fly points, uh, for future travel, and also to keep money in our offset account for longer. Before we used a credit card, we just had an everyday spending account, um, and we usually keep between $600 to $800 a week in there as like a nice little buffer. Would be for all of our variable expenses. So all of these over here, that would be our groceries, eating out, takeaway, shopping, anything that was a variable expense would come from our spending account. And this is pretty much how it goes on our budget spreadsheet. So anything from the bills would come from our bills account.
For example, at the beginning of the month, I want to budget $40 for gas, $120 for electricity, $70 for water, $75 for car insurance, $65 for the gym, and $40 for pet insurance. Then we've got our total, so $822 we need to set aside for bills for the month. That is our first fixed expense. Gorge. Then we have our subscriptions: $20 for Netflix, $10 for Apple, I'm just kind of making up these numbers, $12 for Disney Plus. $42 we need to set aside for subscriptions. And then car loan, let's say $500, and mortgage, $2,500. So that's another $3,000 for our fixed expenses. Then I would go back over here and have a look at how much money we have left over. So our total income is $10,000. Our bills are $822, subscriptions are $42, and our debt is $3,000. So we still have $6,136 left over to play with.
When you're really in your savings era, you want to save before you spend. So rather than budgeting for all of your variable expenses or your willy-nilly fun purchases, you want to budget for your savings first and then work out how much you have left over. So, for example, our financial goal might be to have $20,000 saved for our house deposit by the end of 2024. Let's pretend it's January, just for the sake of it. Oh, I, I actually can't do the maths. Let's do $24,000. That just seems more simple. I need to save $2,000. So I'm factoring that into my budget, like that's a non-negotiable. And then for travel, let's say $500. That leaves us with $3,636 left over to budget. And then this is where we make it work in our expenses. So groceries, that might be $500. Eating out might be $150. Takeaway, another $50. Shopping, that might be a money value for you, $400. Home, maybe $100. Gifts, you've got a couple of birthdays coming up. Like, these expenses will change month to month. Like, I can show you as an example just how different they have been for us month to month. January, our budget was $3,330. June, it was $2,930. This month's budget, we budgeted $4,285 'cause we knew it would be a higher spend month. So no two months are the same.
And also because my income is so variable, there's some months where we have a little bit more wiggle room versus others. It definitely is easier to budget when you have a consistent income, but not impossible when it comes to budgeting variable income. I think it's again a bit of trial and error. I personally like to lobal everything that I think I'm going to make. So, say I've invoiced for $10,000, I will budget for $5,000 because I know that, you know, not all of those invoices are going to be paid in time. There's some things as well, I think, as a business owner, or at least in my situation, when you're self-employed, there are some elements or some parts of your income that are consistent, and usually before the month starts, have a good idea of what income is going to come in from those streams or sources. So I usually try and work off of that, and then anything else is an extra bonus, just keeping things realistic. And then that way, you're not ever disappointed.
When it comes to budgeting our quarterly bills, try looking back at the last few bills and working out what your average is and then dividing it into a monthly amount. So, for example, a $150 water bill, I need to set aside $50 a month. Because we have that separate bills account, I'm never really worried about what the actual bill amount is or when it comes out. I'm just worried about what it is on a monthly basis. You could obviously go back and, like, in retrospect, change the totals that you've set aside.
And then when it comes to actually using the spreadsheet, I'll input my income. So, got paid on the 10th, got paid $2,500 as I expected, or as Nick expected, should I say. Nick's income. I will set aside half of the money for my bills. So $40 for my gas, and putting $120 in my bills account for electricity, $70 for water, $98 for council rate, $79 for internet, and we'll do $130 for our phone. So that's $537 that I've put into my bills account. And now I know I have $1,963 left to spend. I know that I could put $500 into my car loan, so I'm going to add this here, "car." And that will show up here. You can tick it off if you want. Oh, I need to pay my mortgage. Half of that is $1,250, I believe. Mortgage. Oh, I put that in the wrong one. There we go. So that's half paid for. Next payday, I'll pay the other half. Again, I'll make that transfer straight into my account. I've got $213 left to spend. Whatever is left to spend is whatever is left over in my spending account and is for my variable expenses. So then as the week goes by, on the 12th, I spend $50 on groceries. That's deducted from here. So I have $163 left in my account, and it's updated here with the actual column. So basically, whatever you put in the transaction tracker will show up here.
Whenever I make a transfer from my account, I'm putting it in here, which is why I like to update it every single day, 'cause there are some things that I look back on, I'm like, you know, when it has like a really random merchant name, and you're like, "What was this? Like, what did I spend this $9.90 on?" And it's like, "Oh, Red Rooster." Like, if too much time has passed, you're not going to remember what that transaction is. The graphs will also update as you go. So 74.9% towards debt, 2.1% on expenses, so we're doing really well with our spending, and 23% towards bills.
Now, when I get paid, because it is variable, I'm not going to make $5,000 straight away. I might make $1,000 one week and $2,000 the next, and I'll just update the actual amount as I go. So, for example, let's say I got paid $2,000 this week. That'll be updated in my left-to-spend amount. I'm going to put $500 in my travel fund 'cause that's really important to me, and that's going straight in my savings. We keep all of our savings in one account just to keep things simple. And the way I track it, I do keep a note on my phone just for my own sake, but also you can see everything in your annuals total. So if you go down to savings, I can see in January I say $500, and if I scrolled across, I can see $500 of my savings is for travel. And then come March, if I actually go on a trip, which would be lovely, I just add it to my transaction tracker. So I just go minus $500. I'm actually spending that money, travel. And that will show up in my left to spend, and then I can spend it and track it as I go. So $30 on eating out for my trip. You basically just have to do a minus, and then it will again show up in your annual totals. So minus $500 in March, my actual amount is now zero. I hope that makes sense.
Yeah, basically how I use this spreadsheet. Honestly, nothing too crazy. I'd like to try and keep it as simple as possible. I know at first glance it might seem a little overwhelming, but the more you use it, the easier it Bec comes, and it really does become one of your daily habits. I also love a visual, and the fact that I can see all of these different graphs and see in real time where my money is going is so motivating. And I really think that's the key to being able to save money. I think sometimes people overcomplicate it. It's really as simple as spending less than you're making. And obviously, there's certain circumstances and situations where that's not possible, and that's an entirely different thing. But if you find yourself just spending beyond your means and not being able to save any money, just start tracking. See where that money goes. Don't even set a budget, no expectations on yourself, just track your money, and you'll be shook 'cause all those little miscellaneous purchases, they add up really fast. Get real with yourself, work out what you are okay on spending money on and areas that you are willing to sacrifice on. And again, keeping that "why" and that money goal at the center of everything you do is key and will really keep you motivated.
So yeah, feel like that's enough of me yapping. I am going to end off this video here. Hopefully, I touched on everything. If you have any specific questions, though, feel free to leave them down below. I will do my best to answer them. Also, follow me over on my TikTok and Instagram if you want to see more personal finance content. Give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed, and I'll see you guys very soon for another video. Bye, guys!