Budgeting Tips From 2 Guys Who Hate Budgeting

[arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZujuLhSvkY" mode="lazyload" align="center" /] What do you do if you hate budgeting and aren't good at it? Here's how 2 guys who hate budgeting approach this problem. Both me and Ben hate budgeting, and aren't really good at it, yet we have achieved financial freedom. If you're struggling with budgeting and the standard tips haven't helped you then this episode is for you. Book a free strategy session with Pumped on Property For those of you who want the jist of it without watching the video or listening to the podcast here's the basic outline. Pay Yourself First - Put money aside as soon as you get paid and strive to live off the rest Don't Acquire Debt - That just makes you go backwards (debt for houses/investments can be different) Find A Budgeting Strategy That Works for You - Everyone is different, what works for me might not work for you Earn More Money - The easiest way to solve your money problems (in my opinion) Transcription: Budgeting can be really hot and at the moment I'm budgeting to try and save for a house among other things and so I decided to get some help from Ben Everingham from pumped on property, but it turns out that he doesn't like budgeting either and is that necessarily the best person at budgeting? So we're going to be calling this episode budgeting tips from two guys who hate budgeting because even though we haven't been the best budget is in our life, we have both achieved financial freedom. I'm in different ways and we've done fairly well and we feel fairly confident in the way we do it. So this might be great tips if you're like, I just need someone to teach me how to be extremely frugal and how to do that sort of stuff. But if you're like struggling with budgeting and everything that the experts say doesn't work for you, then we are your point of last resort. We are the place. You come here. Everything else doesn't work. Just disclaimer, obviously this isn't financial advice is for general educational purposes only. So yeah, so I'm trying to budget Ben. I'm trying to save money for house among other things and so basically I've got the idea of pay yourself first, which I think is really important and I've kind of got that down pat. Everything else are really struggling with. So maybe we'll start with pay yourself first and then we can look at the other things. Um, the thing about pay yourself first from my perspective, cause like my wife just doesn't even get budgeting, like she's just got like made to make money or her making money and that's like, you know, don't even bring the word into our house. I like as soon as she does it, she'll like self sabotage and almost like go the other way, which is why I obviously look after the finances and not my wife in the productive to budget. But I think, you know, like in terms of this concept of paying yourself first. I think I heard it from Tim Ferriss ages ago, like eight years ago. And it resonated with me. It's much easier to go when I was ending it at thousand dollars a week. Um, when I finished university I just had this thing and I was like, I'll say 400 bucks a week, which 40 percent of your income was a pretty significant amount now that I look back, but I also made the decision that once I've finished uni, I'd start living out of home. I'd moved back home for that first year and try and save a deposit to sort of speed the process up. So 40 percent was achievable then. Um. Is your expenses increase? Obviously not, but it has worked for me since then, every single week, regardless of how much I'm earning, I've always put away a certain dollar amount as, as I've earned more. I've tried to increase that dollar amount a little bit. And it's funny when you, when you saving 20 grand a year or 40 grand a year, all of a sudden every couple of years you have a deposit for another house or shares or super or wherever your financial advisor tells you to place your money. I'm aware. Have you decided you decided to place your money where to place your money and you know, like you've got to do something with that money because it's not doing anything for you in the bank and you know, my tendency was if I didn't have a plan for it, for the pain myself, first money, I'd always find a way to go and a good holiday or do something else with it. So it was much easier to just have that plan and just stick to it if you know what I mean. Yup. And so that's kind of what the way that I'm approaching it in my life because I know that when it comes to saving, like, but I know that budgeting isn't my strong point so I can get real with myself and I can say that throughout my life this has. I haven't been very good at this. I was great at it when I was a teenager and had no expenses except just living at home. I was able to save heaps of money, but as soon as I moved out of home, got married, had kids, there's a lot of expenses to juggle. Kids are expensive, um, you know, and so kind of the pay yourself first went out the door when that happened. And so I'm getting back into that now. Especially running my own business. I feel more comfortable with paying myself first and then learning to live off the rest or finding ways to make more money so that we can get by. So for me, I'm putting aside money every single week a certain amount every single week that's going into our savings account. And so that's been put away, that's being saved. And so it's Kinda like I, I know within, I know within my soul that if I try and just budget and be really good and save whatever's leftover after I budget, I'll end up with nothing. Because as you said, it's like, well maybe we'll go on a holiday. We could do an extra trip to Sydney if we save a few thousand dollars, you know, and go and see family again. And you come up with ways to spend that money. So putting it aside and having a plan for that and having it locked away has been really helpful because I feel like if you don't do anything else right, at least if you've saved that money aside and your whole other, the rest of your life's in financial shambles, hopefully you're not in debt. Like I don't get in debt. That's another big thing. Um, but yeah, like at least then I'm saving and then I've just got to work out the rest and live with it. The funny thing about paying yourself first is that builds momentum and it starts off slow, like anything, but it does snowball and it feels really, really, really good when you've got a little bit of a buffer there. And it goes from point. I think once you've got more than 40 odd grand in the bank where it's less about spending it and more about continuing to grow. I think like that's what I found like as soon as I got over that tipping point, 40 grands, too much to book a holiday or you know, in my world, like I only get on holidays for two weeks to a month Max because I get to itching on a holiday and I want to get back into using my brain again. But you know, like 40 k's a lot to drop on a holiday. It's too much to go out and spend on most things. So it's like, oh, I'm just going to let this continue to go. And I think about myself like this wasn't budgeting, saving. I hate those terms. Like I like investing, I like holidaying. I like looking after my family. They're better terms for me mentally, but up to the age of 24, like I literally had $0 to my name. I was living wait to wake. I went on heaps of holidays. Like I went overseas, like don't know, 10 or 11 times between 18 and 24. That was where my money would go to, but as soon as I'd achieved the goal of the holiday road, get on the holiday and spend it all or come back in like five to 10 k of credit card debt. And that wasn't a good sock would have been. But when I met my wife, she was actually the amazing one. She would, she'd say she'd bought her own car, she had money in the bank. Um, she taught me how to do that and now she can't do it and I can say I don't know what happened there. Yeah. And I think another big thing as well is not getting in debt is really helpful for us. Um, because it's so easy to pick up a payment plan here and there and you just acquire yourself huge amounts of debt. And so if you like paying yourself first and saving money, but then you're acquiring debt, which is obviously going to be at a higher interest rate economy going backwards. So I feel like I pay myself first, but I don't get myself into debt. We have a two grand credit card limit and so we leave it at that, but then like things happen in life and it's like, well we could get a car, maybe we should do a payment plan, and I'm always like, nope, no payment plan for you because I'm avidly against anything that it's like debt or payment plan or anything like that. Even my wife went to a thermomix night, which if anyone has been to one of those comes home, we need to buy a thermomix. Apparently those things are pretty expensive. You're talking $2,000 sort of thing as well. You can just do a payment plan and pay x amount a week, and I'm like, no, we're not going to do that. If we're going to buy a thermomix we I'm happy to save for thermomix and purchase it outright. Lucky. That's all we need. Like we're Vegan as well, so it would actually be very helpful to us. But in terms of payment plan, it's just like I just steer clear of all of that so I find that helpful as well because at least then you're not going backwards in your life. There's two things there, like the first is I've talked to people that aren't and 50 grand a year like I used to that bought two properties. I've talked to people that aren't a million bucks a year and have zero savings, zero assets and zero clue of what they're doing. There's more money going in and coming, going out and coming in. So it's not what you earn. As Robert Kiyosaki says, it's what you do with what you own and having that pay sell first thing is huge.