[youtube id="uAhYU8wph9Y" align="left" mode="lazyload" maxwidth="500"]

Budgetting doesn't come naturally to most of us. For those of you who struggle (like me) here are some tips on budgetting that have helped me.

Budgeting your spending can be really hard. It's not something that comes naturally to most of us. And so, I wanted to give you some tips on budgeting your spending. These things have worked for me and they may or may not work for you. Hey, I'm Ryan from onproperty.com.au, helping you find positive cash flow property.

One of the things that people tell me that consistently holds them back from investing in property is they don't have the ability to save a deposit or they don't have a big enough deposit and they're in that process. Budgeting and saving a deposit can be really hard. So that's why I wanted to create this episode to just give you guys an idea of how we do it, which is far from perfect, but it may suit you.

The reason that i wanted to share this is because a lot of people out there will lay out one particular way of budgeting and say that, "this is the best way to do it". Most of the time, it's you set your weekly budget or monthly budget or whatever it is. You section it off into little portions so you've got $20 for entertainment. You've got $10 for coffee. You know, you've got $50 for groceries, whatever it may be. $50 for grocery is not much when you have 3 children, you tell me.

Especially one who's gluten and dairy-free and you have to spend $9 on a loaf of bread to buy nice gluten-free bread. Anyway, most of them just teach that and say that that's the way to do it. Me and my wife tried that. We even tried putting cash in separate envelopes for each individual thing, like entertainment, coffee, etcetera, and it was just so painful to deal with. It just didn't suit us at all. So we found something that suits us and I through it'll be helpful to share these with you.

First thing I'd like to say is that if you're trying to save a deposit or if you're trying to pay off debt, I do believe that there is great value in doing that first. So when you get paid, whether it be weekly, fortnightly, monthly, whatever it is, take a portion of your money first and put it towards savings or take a portion of your money first and put it towards paying off debt before you start living out the week, before you start spending money. And then, once you've done that – so you've saved or you've paid off debt – it's then your goal and your task to try and live off the rest or to try and make more money so you can afford to live off the rest.

So that is an option, to actually try and make more money so that you can afford to live more comfortably even though you're saving. So this is something that we consistently do – is that every week, when we get paid, some money goes aside towards savings and things like that and then we have to live off the rest.

So let me just start with that. So, the thing that we have found was helpful for us is basically, the first step we did was to calculate all our regular monthly expenses. So, we've got things that we have to pay every week, like rent for our house. We've got things like our phone bills, internet, insurances, all of that sort of stuff. We pay that stuff monthly. So, basically, we calculated how much we had to pay monthly in terms of those bills. And we then worked out, "Okay, how much do we have left over that we want to spend each week?"

So we earn X amount, we've got these monthly expenses, and then it's kind of a balancing act for us between how much do we want to save or use to reduce debt versus how much do we want to put towards our lifestyle and things like that. But once we got the monthly expenses out of the way and they're kind of taken care of out of the pay, then comes the working out how much we have to spend weekly. And we found it really useful to set a fixed weekly amount of money that we have to spend. And so, each week,