Today I want to talk to you about… Spending Plans!

So far I’ve told you my story, the light version, I’ve talked to you about budgets, the extremely light version of Spending Plans and I’ve talked to you about the difference between Needs and Wants, that we sometimes have trouble distinguishing!

So I feel we are becoming good friends and it’s time to let you in on a secret. No matter how hard you try to stick to a budget if you are counting only on the numbers and your will power to get there… you probably won’t.

I don’t mean to discourage you, that’s not it. I want you to be excited about taking your finances into your own hands. Be in charge. Tell your money where to go. All this is very exciting and it’s the best thing anyone can do to feel in control of your life!

Now, everytime I talk about living on a budget, creating a spending plan, people automatically assume that it’s hard, they don’t want to be told by a piece of paper how to live their life! (this is the feedback I got from my episode on budgets)

So I want to dig a little bit deeper on the subject because I think I wasn’t clear! And I understand it’s hard, it’s actually very hard to, having lived for 10 or 20 years without a budget or some kind of plan for your finances the thought of creating one gives you chills!

Now I want to challenge you to be open minded about all I’ll be saying today because, I lived for 20 years without a plan for my money and the only reason I even considered ever creating a budget was when we had no money to pay the bills let alone get food on the table. So, my friend, please don’t let yourself get to that point before you take action! Not that you will get to that point! But I never thought I would either, so, there’s that!

But let’s say that you are doing just fine, even though you don’t pay your credit card balance in full at the end of the month and yes you have a car loan, but who doesn’t? And a mortgage, that’s normal, your student loans, you are paying them religiously, so what if you've been out of school for many years? the government says it’s ok to pay them a little at a time and you are doing exactly that!

Now imagine I don’t know, a pandemic hits! And you see your income being cut or you lose one of the 3 jobs you had before it all shut down! Maybe it’s time to look at that spending plan thing again? Maybe try to find out exactly how it works? I don’t know, maybe give it a shot?

A budget or a spending plan or whatever you choose to call it, is a very personal thing! You can not go on the internet, find a model budget and copy it and just go for it! Well you can, but there’s a little problem with that. It won’t work and you’ll get frustrated with it and yourself and you’ll give up. A few months later, or years, you decide to give it another shot and you relive that whole shabbang for the second time with no positive results.

Now, the first thing you need to do is to find out exactly what your financial situation is.

I’ll put the link to the pdf in the show notes if you want to grab it

https://linktr.ee/Thesparklingbudgeteer