This is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself.

If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.

Three days ago was money day.

I registered for GST, split my business and personal expenses, and defined my bookkeeping rituals (most people call these standard operating procedures).

I’m not done but the skeleton is there. Let me tell you about my bookkeeping rituals.

Some of these build on existing rituals and some are being built from the ground up. These will undoubtedly change but it’s a good starting point for the new financial year. Credit to Emily Volz for her financial foundation series, Mike Michalowicz for his Profit First concept, and many others whose frameworks I’ve frankensteined together that (hopefully) works for me.

Feedback welcome!

See all of the rituals here.

This is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself.

If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.

Two days ago was money day.

I registered for GST, split my business and personal expenses, and defined my bookkeeping rituals (most people call these standard operating procedures).

I’m not done but the skeleton is there. Let me tell you separating business and personal expenses.

Here’s my set up:

I cover all business expenses and submit expense claims.

Invoices will be paid into the business transaction account. When this happens:

When funds come into IO…

All card payments and one-offs are put through IRL Spending which is then fed by the account it comes out of. Any business expenses are claimed and paid when the next invoice comes in.

This took a couple of hours. It feels good.

This is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself.

If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.

Yesterday was money day.

I registered for GST, split my business and personal expenses, and defined my bookkeeping rituals (most people call these standard operating procedures).

I’m not done but the skeleton is there. Let me tell you about GST.

There are 3 ways you can do this:

When I called the ATO, I received a very kind but overly unhelpful automated message saying that they’re busy and they can’t take my call. In the week leading up to the end of financial year, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I called twice more, just in case there had been a mistake. There hadn’t been.

I would have given up, except that I had promised myself (and stated publicly in a few places to keep me accountable) that I would register for GST by 1 July. I decided to try the Business Portal path.

Accessing the Business Portal…isn’t straightforward. I’ve had an ABN for a few years but that’s not enough to get you onto the Business Portal. You need an AusKEY or MyGov and something called RAM (not the computer kind).

I tried AusKEY first. It turns out that this is a Chrome or Firefox add-on that gives you a unique identifier to access your account. You can also run it off a USB stick. The USB option is probably more secure but I was more worried about getting it working.

I had to verify my identity first. That was ok. I filled out the form. I had the ID I needed. I installed AusKEY. And…it didn’t work.

I attempted to log into the Business Portal but AusKEY didn’t come up as an option. I tried in two browsers. I probably should have tried resetting the computer but I was on Focusmate and I didn’t want to kill the call when there was another option. I ignored the troubleshooting suggestions and decided to give the MyGov option a try.

RAM stands for Relationship Access Manager. I just followed the pages that came up, downloaded an app, verified my identification again, and it worked.

The Business Portal is not the prettiest or most user-friendly thing. There was an instructions page that saved me.

And so I registered for GST.

The whole process took me around 45 minutes.

I’ll probably only ever do this once in my life. Thank goodness.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about how I split my business and personal expenses. The day after I’ll talk about how I defined my bookkeeping rituals (most people call these standard operating procedures).

 This is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself.

If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.

The next thing I’m doing from the plan I made a few days ago is to understand where my money is spent.

The questions I want to ask are:

I’ve just added these questions to my weekly reflection questions.

Another part of this is making a habit of questioning my purchases.

I’ve gone through my fixed expenditure in past posts but I haven’t talked about variable expenditure.

I’ve used YNAB in the past but I’ve been manually keying and it was taking more time than it added value. I also refused to use adjustment transactions so I would go to extreme (and unnecessary) lengths to figure out discrepancies and get accounts to reconcile.

To do this:

1. I’m splitting my business and personal finances. This should have happened earlier.

2. I’m splitting my personal fixed costs and my personal variable costs. I’m doing this by using separate accounts.

What this means is that I can review one account to see my variable discretionary spending. More on this in future articles. For now…

The other thing I’m doing is setting up Pocketbook. I’ll categorise the June expenses to date (and see how long it takes) and see what my backwards looking discretionary spending looks like.

90 minutes later

I did not expect that to take 90 minutes.

I went through 30 days of expenses, creating custom categories as I went.

I made a bonus discovery: I accidentally doubled up on a payment and I’m $800 richer than I thought I was. YAY!

If 30 days of categorisation takes 90 minutes, I would hope that I can keep a weekly run through at around 10 minutes.

I’ll let you know when it happens on Monday.

I’ve had a flick through the last 30 days.

Without historical trends to look at (I cannot express how tempting it is to go back and categorise a few more months), the biggest question I have for myself is:

Is it in line with where I want to go to be spending $500 (AUD) on eating out in one month?

This  is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is  about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for  myself.

If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.

The next thing I’m doing from the plan I made a few days ago is to understand where my money is invested.

Despite  having debt and being bad with money, I’ve been saved by the country I  live in. Here in Australia, employers are required to contribute to your  retirement savings. If your salary is $100,000 pre-tax, they will put  $9,500 into your superannuation account. Because I’ve been working since  I was 15, I have a good amount in retirement savings. I lost some to  not caring but it’s now all in one place.

Side  note: If you’re Australian and you haven’t consolidated your  superannuation, please take the time to do it. You could be costing your  future self tens of thousands of dollars. 

100% is in the High Growth investment option (note: different funds have different names for their options)

The major holdings (as at 31 May 2019) of this fund include BHP, Woodside Petroleum, Rio Tinto, Oil Search, and Santos.

There is another investment option: Sustainable High Growth

The investment strategy of this option is: “To invest in a diversified portfolio of Australian and international shares selected on the basis of sustainable investment criteria (and the application of some negative screens), together with Australian Listed Property.”

Their screening criteria is here.

There are other ethical funds in Australia (this article is older so the rates may note be up to date) but I’m not willing to do a massive research project at this stage.

I’ve just rolled my entire balance and any future payments from High Growth to Sustainable High Growth.

One  day, I may also do a research project to find the right fund and  investment option to suit my combination of ethical preference and  required rate of return…one day.

 This is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself.

If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.

The first thing I’m doing from the plan I made a few days ago is to understand how I’m spending. I started by listing all of my fixed costs and interrogating them one-by-one.

Up until this point, I’ve been able to reduce my monthly costs by $372.64 (AUD)

In doing this exercise, I’ve discovered a problem category: personal and professional development.

Today I’ve taken the time to delve deeper into everything in this category. This category totals around $420 (AUD) per month. That’s one high ticket course or a new macbook in seven months. That’s half my rent.

But it’s also more than that. When I participate in a community or program, I’m paying with my time and attention as well. I have to be comfortable with the opportunity cost.

Questions I’ve asked myself include:

Check out the full blog post with the info here.

This is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself.

If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.

The first thing I’m doing from the plan I made a few days ago is to understand how I’m spending. I started by listing all of my fixed costs and interrogating them one-by-one.

Up until this point, I’ve been able to reduce my monthly costs by $301.14.

I’ve split these costs by business and personal and then looked at the groups that have emerged under each banner. A problem area did come up so I’ll go wayyy deeper into that tomorrow. Dollar amounts for line items removed but feel free to comment and ask about it if you so desire. Any dollar amounts given are in AUD.

Feel free to do a cross-examination.

This is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself.

If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.

The first thing I’m doing from the plan I made a few days ago is to understand how I’m spending. This means listing out all of my fixed costs and interrogating them.

Up until this point, I’ve been able to reduce my monthly costs by $301.14. Let’s see how I go today.

Feel free to do a cross-examination.

These are the last costs I’ll be interrogating. Tomorrow, I’ll interrogate categories of costs.

I’m ok with this price to know that all of my photos and videos and messages are kept somewhere besides my phone and laptop.

The health insurance keeps this price low. It’s fixed. At some point, I will have to progress to orthotics. A cost to keep in mind.

The health insurance keeps this price low. It’s fixed. I may drop down to annually in future but there are a few things we’ve been keeping an eye on so happy to go every six months.

Again, health insurance has reduced the cost of this. I like going but I think I need to redefine what I want to get out of it. What I started going for is no longer an issue. Adding it to my task manager.

8 hours of focused work per week, two work marathons, and a pentathlon…this is very worth it for me.

I’m keeping this website on Wordpress because it’s just so much better for SEO and bloging than Clickfunnels is. I will port the domain to Namecheap as soon as I can though.

Used daily. Very very useful for knowing when we’re all in danger. Keeping it.

I love this tool and I get value out of it regularly — I’ve created a TODO to make sure I’m getting the most out of it. I’m 90% sure there are some integrations I haven’t hooked up yet.

I have temporarily switched to Notion while I don’t have my Macbook. I hands down prefer Bear but it doesn’t have a PC or web version. Anywho, this annual expense isn’t for another six months but I’m sure I’m keeping it.

I only have five. I think that’s reasonable. Currently using them all. Auto-renew is off for the ones that are only temporary projects.

The reality is that I average to quarterly. This is pretty fixed.

 — 

No money saved today.

 This is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself. 

The first thing I’m doing from the plan I made four days ago is to understand how I’m spending. This means listing out all of my fixed costs and interrogating them.

Up until this point, I’ve been able to reduce my monthly costs by $274.14. Let’s see how I go today.

Feel free to do a cross-examination.

I have Stitcher Premium so that I can listen to a specific podcast (By The Book: Authors Tell All). I use Overcast (free) as my main podcast app so I’m really only paying this for this specific show. Thing is, I’m totally behind on the show. Keeping it for now and adding a reminder to re-evaluate in 2 months.

Yeah. This one is a fixed cost. It’s no interest (for now) so I’m sticking to the minimum.

I was ready to pause this subscription. But it turns out people have subscribed to my mailing list. So I should actually keep it and email them. I will be emailing people for the rest of my life. I’m going to keep this.

We’re paying for the ability to be pretty average housekeepers the rest of the time. Worth it, but I could cut it if I had to.

I do a lot of my reading on Medium and I’m happy to pay this price to be able to access all of the articles and make my applause worth something.

I seldom use CityCycles but I like paying this small amount to have the option.

I have been subscribed since the beginning (6 months ago) and still haven’t gone in and completed the course modules. I’ll keep it until the end of the year because I really want to support Gretchen’s work. I’ve added it to my calendar to actually participate in the July theme (family).

I use this to manage every collaborative project that I lead. I love it and I don’t know that I could ever let go of it. And, seriously, I’m tied into it for at least two projects and two teams.

I’ll be cancelling this next week. It’s a great product but I’ve moved from charging by the hour to charging by the day. I like it to see how good I am at time estimation but I can easily get away with something much simpler (like the built in 17hats timer).

Yeah. This one is a fixed cost (for now!). I‘m aggressively paying down one and sticking to minimums on the others.

Fixed. We’re here for at least another six months. When we move or renew, I’ll consider moving to a 50/50 split (currently he’s bearing more because of differing income levels).

I use this mostly for Acrobat but it’s nice to be able to use Photoshop and InDesign if I need to. I checked the cost for Acrobat standalone and it’s actually the same!

I use it almost daily. Keeping it.

—

I reduced my monthly outgoings by $27!

This is my journey to apply the book, Unf*ck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself.

If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.

The first thing I’m doing from the plan I made three days ago is to understand how I’m spending. This means listing out all of my fixed costs and interrogating them.

Up until this point, I’ve been able to reduce my monthly costs by $267.15. Let’s see how I go today.

Feel free to do a cross-examination.

This is my current repository for working notes. I had to switch from a Mac to a PC recently which meant I had to switch from Bear to something. This was that something. Keeping it.

I send this to my partner for fuel and upkeep of the vehicle. I could stop the payment but, by sending it, I don’t feel bad about asking for rides or him driving us everywhere (I don’t have a licence).

Because of this course, I re-shaped how I do bespoke services and made work a pleasure to scope and deliver. I’ll switch to the annual version ASAP because I know I’ll be keeping it for more than four more months (the annual version is the monthly fee x 4). I just sent the email to support about this.

I use Spotify more often but I like having the option and the price is worth having that option. Keeping it.

I need this on this tier. I could shop around but my waiting periods would reset and I can’t afford to risk that.

Loving using this tool. All of my websites will move to here.

For now, I am loving using it to experiment with and test some stuff. That said, I can only justify it long term if I have actual funnels on it leading to actual products. I will re-evaluate in 3 months. I created a reminder.

I attend up to 5 times per week and this is where I get my cardio too. Keeping it.

This gives me access to Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. I use at least one of them daily. Keeping it.

This is the name I give to savings. This is only a nominal amount but the payment has been consistently going out for 9 months. It means I can up the recurring payment when I get to that point (aiming for next month!)

I have this to take advantage of free shipping. I rarely purchase physical products. I cancelled it. I will re-add it next time I order a physical product in that category.

This has kept me publishing daily for almost a third of the year. Keeping it!

I use this for my weekly reviews and tracking actions towards goals. It has been invaluable. Keeping it.

 — 

I reduced my monthly outgoings by $6.99!