Budgeting for Beginners: How to Start Managing Your Money

I help women be super intentional with their money so they can do more of what they want and in today's video I'm gonna be teaching you how to create a budget it does not matter what your income is it does not matter if it's a hundred dollars a thousand dollars ten thousand dollars you can create a budget a budget is simply your money plan it is you intentionally and strategically deciding how you want to spend your money.

You get it so if you are ready to better manage your money then this video is for you so let's go ahead and dig right on it okay so I do have a mock budget planner here that I'm going to be using to help you get the handle of budgeting so before we do anything I want you to just take a deep breath in and give yourself Grace what you did with your money last year last week last month does not define where you are today and where you want to go with your money so today is a great day to start better managing your  money I don't care if you didn't get paid yet if you just got paid you don't know when you're getting paid that part doesn't matter what matters is you decide intentionally how you want to spend your money now to get started creating a budget it's very simple you do not need a fancy planner literally all you need is a calendar overview so a calendar view and about four sheets of paper front and back you can have it in a nice organized way inside of a planner or you can get a 1.25 calendar.

Dollar Tree and a 1.25 cents notebook and put them together right so you just need a calendar and some papers to get started now we are going to be budgeting monthly I highly suggest you do a monthly overview so you know total monthly how much money you're going to be receiving and total monthly how much money is going to be leaving for your bills your expenses your savings and anything that you are spending money on we want to do a zero based budget so what that means is every dollar has a purpose there's no such thing as extra money there's no such thing as an extra paycheck if you are anticipating receiving money it should be managed and intentionally given a purpose money flows where there is purpose if you don't give the dollars a purpose you will spend it recklessly tip number one we want to to write down our top two to three money goals for the month why is it important to write down your money goals you need an anchor you need a focus point you need something to go back to I teach my clients inside the money saving Academy all the time to ask.

Yourself does this money Choice get me closer to the goals I set for the month in the year or does it get me further away so in our mock budget the goals that we set are to pay our bills on time save 100 in our emergency fund and pay off two hundred dollars on our Discover credit card so for the month of January when we are creating our budget those are the three things we want to do bills paid on time one hundred dollars in the emergency fund and two hundred dollars towards our Discover credit card so now we have an anchor and now we have a focus tip number two at the top of your page right underneath your goals you can even you want to write what your monthly income is so look at all your paychecks if you get paid once twice three times four times whatever write down your monthly income now if you have any money left over from the previous month that is called rollover write down that rollover amount as well and the reason where you may have rollover is maybe you didn't use up all of your expenses or maybe you have bills due at the beginning of the month before you get your first paycheck in January that you held over from December to make sure those bills get paid on time so write down your total income estimated for this upcoming month now a lot of people are going to say crystal I don't know my income varies I'm gonna give y'all some examples I used to be a server I used to waitress I used to wait tables I used to make money every single day and it was not guaranteed some days I made thirty dollars some days I made two hundred dollars but when you are budgeting.

Budget on average so on average I made about a hundred dollars per shift there were slow days and there were faster days so if I worked four days I would assume that I'm gonna make on average but between three to four hundred dollars so I would budget for about three hundred dollars and if I do three hundred dollars a week times four because it's four weeks in a month that would give me twelve hundred dollars for my job when I was a waitress so I hope that makes sense and that's what I would suggest that you do and you budget off of that amount of money and if you make more you can manage that more but for now budget off of your lowest average Step number three is to know your numbers you have to get down to the nitty gritty the first thing you need to know is your bills bills is anything with the due date that is reoccurring so your rent your mortgage your car payment your car insurance your internet your phone bill your kids soccer whatever anything that has a due date you want to write down the bill name the amounts.

The due date the due date is super important because once you list them all out on your sheet of paper like I have listed here for the example you're going to open up your calendar and you're gonna put rent on the first with the amount and then you're gonna put your kids soccer on the 15th with the amount you're going to put your car payment with the amount on the fifth so you're going to list it out and you're gonna put it in your calendar overview so you can clearly see what bills are due when if you don't know all of your bills or you always forget something open up your bank account go through see how much the bill is and the date if your bills fluctuate like the electricity in the water do the average look at the past three months if on average your electricity has been like 195 205 or like 180 then maybe you budget 215 dollars for the water bill so you want a budget based on your average and you know a little extra just in case it fluctuates up so write down all of your bills with the due date after your bills.

We need to write down our expenses expenses are anything that you spend money on that doesn't have a due date so your gas your groceries your date nights your eating out your fun money your kids want to go to the mall money whatever it is that you spend your money on that does not have a due date now expenses is where you're going to basically give each one of these categories an amount that you want to spend I call these baby budget so you'll hear me say I have a grocery budget I have a beauty budget so what that means is this is my grocery line item so let's just say for my family of three our grocery expenses are four hundred dollars per month now the thing about budgeting y'all is you set the numbers and you force yourself to stay under it that's when you shop sales deals and use coupons to help yourself stay under the budget that you set but you don't let the grocery store tell you what to buy and you don't let the prices of the store dictate what your grocery budget is if you only want to spend four.

Hundred dollars your create natively gonna find a way to shop at your local grocery store Walmart Target hell even the dollar store to stay under your budget okay so you are going to bring out your expense categories again if you don't know where you spend your money outside of bills go through your bank account see where you spend your money and categorize it together so for beauty I put my nails anything I spend on my hair my waxes I put all of that under Beauty and I put on average how much do I want to spend per month in that category so go ahead and write out what you want to spend on expenses and then third most importantly is your savings funds what are you saving for everyone should have an emergency fund but then what you're saving for could be important to you maybe you have a big vacation coming up maybe you have an event you need to go to for work maybe you have a birthday party in another state that you're going to be attending whatever it is that you are saving for long term you need a savings fun you can't just say oh my savings.

Savings needs a purpose remember money flows where there's a purpose so you need to write down all of your savings categories so that you know where you want to put your money for the month so now you know your numbers and now you're gonna go through and you're gonna take your income amount and you're gonna subtract your expense funds your savings and your bills and you're gonna see if the numbers add up so if your monthly income is three thousand dollars and your bills and expenses comes to thirty two hundred dollars that means you don't have enough money coming in to cover all of your bills and expenses so you need to go back to your expenses because those are the things that you have control over and reduce it by two hundred dollars and if it's the opposite if you do everything and you come out to twenty eight hundred dollars great job you're under budget but you need to give that extra 200 a purpose it could be to go into your cushion fund so next month maybe you're expecting to miss some days.

Work unpaid you can put that into a cushion fund so that way you have money to cover maybe your electricity for the next month or you can allocate it to savings or you can allocate it to expenses maybe you want to treat yourself for date night maybe there's a birthday coming up and you want to go ahead and buy that birthday gift early that's totally fine the point is every dollar needs a purpose I don't care what you spend your money on I just care that you have a plan for the money every dollar that comes in should have a purpose even if that purpose is just for your emergency fund or for your kids birthday party that's in six months number four now that you have your monthly overview we need to break this down paycheck to paycheck and I did that in here so I'll pop that up on the screen but we want to break that down paycheck to paycheck and this part is so important because you need to know what you're doing with your money when it's time so you're gonna go ahead and you're going to decide with Paycheck number one this is what I'm gonna do with my money my bills my expenses my savings and with Paycheck number two this is what I'm gonna do if you get paid weekly write that down if you get paid three times that month write it down each paycheck should have a focus this way when you sit down on payday you know what you're paying and you know how to allocate your money number five I kind of said this in number two I think but write down all of your bills and your income dates on your calendar so in your calendar overview.

You want to put paydays on payday you want to put when you are going to pay your electricity bill when you're paying your rent you want to put that in there so say your electricity is due on the 15th but you like to pay it on the 10th that's totally fine you can put the 10th on there as your indicator of like okay in the paycheck that comes around the 10th that's when I need to pay my electricity but this just serves as a visual reminder so you that you can see what you need to pay when and you may need to do this part first and then make your paycheck to paycheck budget so you can kind of see all right if this is due here and I get paid here I'm gonna pay this with Paycheck number one and I'm gonna pay this with Paycheck number two one thing I highly suggest if you are in a place to do this split up your big bills right so if your rent or your mortgage is your biggest Bill don't have one paycheck go completely to rent and one paycheck go to everything else break it up if your rent is let's just say twelve hundred dollars six hundred dollars per paycheck is saved for your rent so you don't have to take one check and just pay your rent number six this is the key this is what most people miss this is the thing that holds you back from sticking to your budget are you ready you need to check in with these numbers on a weekly basis so what I suggest is you do a expense tracker so on your paper you can literally put expense the date what it was for what was it categorized with and the amount so basically when I go and spend money.

I'm going to put 7-Eleven I'm gonna put it was on December 1st I'm gonna put that I spent 25 and that category is gas this is so important to do once a week bare minimum if you want to do it more often that's great I highly suggest once a week or at the max every 10 days because this is going to allow you to see are you sticking to your gas budget are you sticking to your grocery budget are you under budget for beauty right what's your electricity a lot less or a lot more than what you expected you need to check in with your spending because if you are already halfway through your grocery budget and it's only the 10th of the month that's an indicator that whoa I've got to slow down or I'm gonna go over budget I need to be more intentional with my money and if you have already gone over then you have to have the conversation of yourself where am I going to pull this money from and my other expense categories to make up for where I went over number seven rinse and repeat and do this every month.

Want to set up your budget every single month why because things are going to fluctuate there's going to be somebody's birthday there's going to be a trip there's going to be when you pay your yearly the Amazon Prime membership there's going to be things that change every single month and you need to set this up every single month and you need to check in with your budget every single week it's not something you can set it and forget it it is not a crock pot your budget is a living breathing document it's something that you need to be engaged in you need to know your numbers you need to know your spending so that you can make the most informed decision for you and your family when it comes to money so if you want more help with budgeting if you want more help with intentionally managing your money I would love to help you inside the money saving Academy there's a link in the description box along with the promo code for you to get some money off of your first month when you join us we create our budgets together every single.

Month we have check-ins in within the money saving Academy we have a course that helps you set up your budget everything that you need to help you better manage your money and put more of what you're saving into your savings account so you can do more of what you want within your life so I would love to help you more with your budget if you have any questions about this you can drop those in the comments but I do answer questions within 24 hours inside the money saving Academy and we have weekly live trainings on Zoom so that we can have a conversation and I can coach you through your questions I really hope this video helps you with starting your budget again if you have any additional questions drop them in the comments I want to thank you all so much for your love.