Listener Budgeting Tips: Roundup #1

[arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2JAlKUmwpE" mode="lazyload" align="center" /] With my goal to get better at budgeting I am reaching out to listeners for their tips. Here are some great tips from Nic on how he revolutionised his budgeting and savings. Transcription: Hey guys, Ryan here from onproperty.com.au. I help people find positive cashflow property and in this episode we are doing some listener budgeting tips, so this is a roundup of some of the tips that I've received via email from listeners. It's going to be kind of short round up because I've got one email, but it's quite a long email that we're going to go through and pull some tips from it, so hopefully this will help you guys as you may know if you've been following. I am working on budgeting at the moment. It's something that I haven't worked on for a number of years that I need to get better at because I'm trying to save and so I've done a bunch of different episodes out there, one on my favorite favorite budgeting APP, which you should check out if you haven't already. And then there's also this one budgeting tips from two guys who hate budgeting. If you want to check that one out. I really liked that one. That one was with Ben Everingham. That was a lot of fun. So you've got to own property. Don't conduct a u four dash four, nine six if you want to check out that one, but this budgeting tip today comes from a listener of the podcast and I'll just bring it up to right now. We're going to read through it together and then I'm going to talk about where I'm at and some of the things that I'm thinking about and what I learned from this email as well. So listener budgeting tips ran up, number one. This is an email from nick, so nick, thank you for taking the time to email me. Really loved reading your email and now I'm sharing it with everyone else, so it says, get a Ryan. Love your podcast man. Been listing for over a year now. The candid conversations about living within your means and seeing or hearing in my case, the growth that you've gone through makes you feel more approachable than any other money finance property podcast. Keep it up, man. As this is one of my favorite listens. Well, let me just stop there and say thanks nick for those super kind words. That's exactly what I'm going for. I listened to a lot of podcasts, watched a lot of youtube videos and stuff like that. I don't like it when the fake and they're hoity toity and all that sort of stuff. Trying to be super professional. I just want to be like we're sitting having a coffee together at a hipster coffee shop down the road, and so that's kind of the vibe that I'm going for, so I really appreciate that that's coming through. And then you said Nice things like that because I want to feel like we have a relationship and that we can just talk normally talk candidly and so yeah, really excited to hear that. So Nick's saying money management is something that I've recently started to take a little more seriously. I was forced to review my finances when I overstretch during a renovation and the bank wasn't forthcoming with the construction loan. My money management is now a combination of the property cash money smart system, which is attached. So we'll talk about that in a sec. Guys, Scott Paper, barefoot investor stuff, and my own twist. Now I do have the barefoot investor book, the Barefoot Investor Book right here. Now this is the second email where I've actually been recommended to read this, so I have started reading this and you know I'm about. I haven't even folded it, but basically are right at the very start. I haven't read much of it, so I definitely need to get onto that, read that and share some of the stuff that I find in that with you guys. So the barefoot investor stuff in my own twists. What's helped me most was the following. So he's even written out a full point list for us. Nick, you are awesome. So tip number one, identify a baseline. I went right back to November 15, categorize every single dollar I spent and the result was I haven't eaten Mcdonald's since I'm a fit dude, but would have to drive past McDonald's everyday coming home from work and the chocolate thick shakes a flipping delicious. Yeah. Once I realized how much money I was wasting on them, it was only too easy to give them up and now fill my water bottle up every time I leave work. So I cannot feed myself some lies about being thirsty on the way home. I now know on average how much are you spending on groceries, car, eating out entertainment, etc. Every month. And so I could sEt realistic goals for each category and you're going to stop there because this is one of the problems that I have with. So I had mentioned my favorite money management app on budgeting app, which you can check out on property.com.eu four slash four slash 94. Now I don't know if Anyone else has the same problem as me, but nikki is talking about how he categorizes everything and a whole makes it, makes a lot of sense where he's spendIng his money. That doesn't work for me. So I use this budgeting app, which is really cool. That helps me budget and see where I'm sending my money. But every week is so different for us as a family. I don't know if it's having five kids. I don't know. No, I don't have five kids. I have three kids with five people in the family. Man, hats off to people out there who are five kids anyway, three kids and so some weeks we'll spend more on groceries, some links we've got like these big closed bills because all of a sudden it's just all three children have grown out of all of their clothes that week and they're just looking really small or maybe they shrunk in the wash and so we'll spend heaps of clothes that week. Other weeks we'll go out more and so it's just all over the place where we're spending our money each week, so I haven't gotten to the point to say, okay, yep. Each week we're going to spend $100 on clothes or each week we're going to spend x amount of money on whatever because it changes every single week and I dunno some ways we don't spend any money on clothes and other ways. I just had to buy new shoes for my son and that will like $60 so it just adds up quickly. So I'm still working on that, but I'm glad that nick has worked that out for himself. Hopefully I can get to that. Point number two is a meal plan. He writes a meal plan on thursday night for the following week, then buys everything through woolies online so he can't be tecta, can't be tempted by their marketing in store. The result he saved on average $200 a month and eating healthier, so this is something that we do kind of. It's not because we choose to, but we're moving towards being vegan and so there's not a lot that you can really go out and eat when you're vegan. it's very difficult. One of the reasons the embraer rose is so good is that they just have a vegan option that you can order or if we drive down to melanie, which is an hour from our house. There's lots of vegans and vegetarians in the area, so there's lots of options there, but for us it's very difficult, so we need to plan our meals ahead of time. We don't plan them a full week in advance or anything like that because our taste buds change on the day and boeing, we do kind of plan maybe twice a week. What we're going to have for the next couple of nights and that does save money, but we do still have the nIghts where we kind of just ate out because we can't be bothered cooking. We actually had one the other night where we had dinner that we're going to have at home. It was actually going to be a pretty cheap dinner as well, but we really didn't feel like cooking and we'd just been out to the beach in lovely new staff for my three year old's birthday. So we'd been out there. The kIds were happy and we like all. There's this really nice indian place where we are and so we're like, we might get indian, maybe we'll take the kids out. And so we decided we're going to go and get India. It's going to cost maybe 25, $30. We'll just get one meal to share and have a nice night out with the kids. There's a spot where the kids can run around, etc. So anyway, we go to this place and we had to catch a bus back from noosa and my daughter gets very motion sickness, but she's also very overdramatic from time to time. And so we go out for dinner and she's being really dramatic about how she's got a sore stomach and may my wife like, what is she on about this time? Um, I didn't really believe her. I didn't believe it was as bad as she was saying. So we went out for dinner, tried to buy her a bunch of things to eat to help her stomach and ended up didn't cost $50. My daughter spent the time crying. She ended up on the floor. We left early. It was just a terrible, terrible experience. Ended up costing us $50 and then we're driving home and my daughter like vomits in the cart from sickness. And so it was just a terrible night out And it was one of those moments where we're like, oh yeah, that was not worth eating out. We should have just gone home and had some good meals at home. And so I don't know why I shared that, but that's just a funny story that haPPened. So point number two was a meal plan and saving money on food because food can just suck you dry of your money. I swear. I know that. I do this with coffee. We used to drink out with coffee because I drink almond milk, not regular cow's milk. They charged me extra coffee gets really expensive. Even if you get a piccolo which has 30 to 50 mils of milk is charging fifty cents. Some places charge me a dollar extra 50 mils of almond milk. It's crazy. Anyway, we're spending a lot of money on coffee and so we decided to rarely drink out for coffee. Now we make coffee ourselves at home and save a lot of money there. So we have a coffee plan and we have times in the day where we have coffee and then we'll go out for coffee occasionally. All right,