Young Scrappy Money Podcast Ep. 008: Budgeting for People Who Hate Budgeting

Michelle promised the dear listeners a podcast on how she budgets, and HERE IT IS. If you’ve struggled with traditional apps and spreadsheets, this episode is for you! She discusses how to give yourself an easy framework for understanding your numbers–and for keeping yourself accountable.

5 Tips from this Episode:

1. Make sure that you know how much your monthly predictable expenses are. This includes every recurring, predictable monthly expense, as well as the less frequent items scaled to a monthly amount.
2. Clearly define your savings goals. Know how much you want to set aside for your goals, for what, and by when.
3. Calculate your spending money. You can do this by taking your monthly income, subtracting out your predictable expenses and savings goals, and scaling things to a weekly amount. Use that information to give yourself a weekly allowance.
4. Separate your bank accounts for your bills and your spending money. Spending money is the hardest to track, but if you separate the money out into its own checking account, you’ll always know how much is left for the week.
5. Give each savings goal its own savings account too, when you can.

Resources from this episode:

• The Young Scrappy Money Academy Digital Subscription Service
• Young + Scrappy, home to Michelle’s work as a financial advisor and financial coach

Full transcript:

INTRO [00:00:00] Hello. And welcome to the Young Scrappy Money podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Waymire. And each week, I’ll be bringing you tips and tricks to help you take control of your finances as well as interviews with people who made big financial changes in their own lives. So join us. And we’ll help you get your financial s**t together.

MICHELLE: Well, hello, everybody. Welcome, welcome. I’m super pumped today. And it’s likely because I got to work early this morning. For those of you who don’t know me, I am very bad at mornings. But today seemed to be a sort of exception to that rule. I stopped at a delicious donut store on my way here. And I got a maple bacon yeast donut.

And it was fantastic. And I think maybe something about the special treat of getting a donut on the way to work or extra sugar in that frosting, which is very sweet and very dense, combined with the healing powers of coffee, and I feel like I’m in it today. Like I’m ready to— I’m ready to do this thing.

So I feel like a lot has happened in the last couple of weeks, which is really exciting. I went on a whole week of vacation, which was lovely. I took a week off work. Normally when I do this, it’s because of some sort of trip. I’m traveling somewhere doing something cool.

This time, I took a whole week off work to stay home and do adult stuff. So it wasn’t really necessarily a staycation in the typical sense, but I guess it kind of was. I hung out with my family. I got my hair done. I hung out at home and cleaned some stuff, got caught up on laundry, got my oil changed, generally just felt like all of the little adult projects that I have not had a ton of energy to do on nights and weekends recently, got a lot of that stuff out of the way, which was really, really nice mostly because— um, let’s see.

I don’t know when this will be posted so I won’t know exactly how many days ago it will be. So I’ll just say on April 6, I turned 30. Yes, I know. I know. You’re probably listening to this— I don’t know at what point where this podcast and, you know, my entire life’s work, all of which is pretty much branded under Young and Scrappy at this point— I’m not sure the age cutoff where I can no longer in good conscience claim to be young and scrappy.

I don’t think 30 is it. I think I’ve still got a long way to go before I even have to worry about that. But it was— it kind of felt like a big deal to me. It was really exciting. I feel like in my 20s, I spent many years kind of learning what’s what, and getting to know myself, and learning to articulate my needs, and all of those like adult communication tools that we don’t always pick up on or even realize that they exist when you’re in your early 20s.

And so now that I hit 30, I feel like I have a lot of tools in my tool belt, my adulthood tool belt, so to speak, that will serve me well in the next decade. So it was just so, so nice to get a week to kind of collect myself and get organized before this big milestone. Threw a party, pretty much ate nothing but cake for like a full week. It was fantastic.

A couple of other things that happened, super exciting, we are on a whole bunch more platforms now. So you might have noticed this. If you read the transcript on the Young and Scrappy website, you’ll have started to see this pop up in here. We are now on plenty of other channels.

So if you want to subscribe to us, you can do so on iTunes, on Stitcher, on Google Play. We are still working on Spotify, but hopefully that will come up soon. And so that way, you know, wherever you get your podcasts, we can hang out there. Definitely feel free on either of those channels to comment, like, give— you know, on iTunes in particular, it’s like star ratings or whatever. Please, please do that if you are so inclined and if you have a love for this podcast and a sense of goodness in your heart.

That is so very helpful because it will help other people find the podcast. It will let them know what to expect. If you like it, make sure that you’re sharing the love. And hopefully, we’ll get to keep doing what we’re doing more.

One other piece of exciting news, if you haven’t checked this out, I do also run a subscription service called the Young Scrappy Money Academy. And we— our Kickstarter just went through for the investing module. So there’s a whole bunch of sweet courses on there on budgeting, on credit scores, on debt, generally just how to get your financial s**t together.

But now we’re gonna have an investing course. So that’ll be live in the next couple of months. I’m in the process of writing that content. I’ve got my video shoots booked. Everything is kind of chugging along. And that’s gonna be super, super sweet.

[00:05:01] So I’ll definitely keep you posted when that goes live. If you’ve ever wanted like a super hands-on, in-depth tutorial of how the f**k investing works, I am trying my darndest to build it for you. So stay tuned there.

So every couple of weeks or so, you know that I do a podcast solo. And I almost always have topics in my back pocket. I always have something I can get on my soapbox about. But for this week, for some reason, I found myself not necessarily sure of what I wanted to talk about.

I feel like the first couple episodes were easy. I knew exactly in my heart of hearts, this is what I need to— this is what I need to be doing. And it wasn’t really until last night when I had this sense of, OK, I might have a topic after all.

So I live in the City of Atlanta. There is a group here called the Center for Love and Light. They are sort of— it’s part event space, part coworking space, part collection of healers. It’s just a really, really neat place to be, a lot of— we can call them good vibes in that building. I’m not what I would consider to be like hyperspiritual or anything like that. But I like got in that building and was like, OK, that phrase good vibes, I feel like it has more meaning to me now.

Anyway, they have a— I think it’s every other month, they have a night called healing night. And practitioners volunteer their time. And people can sign up for a low fee and get, you know, 15-minute mini sessions with all of these various healers and practitioners.

So I like to go and volunteer my financial services. I just go and casually coach people. Mostly it’s talking through money feelings, discussing goals that people have. And I feel like one topic that came up a few times with people was budgeting.

And I’ve promised you before— I’ve told you at some point I’m gonna get on my soapbox. And I’m gonna tell you how I feel about budgeting and how I do it that’s different than most people. So after healing night last night, I’ve decided this morning today is the day. Today is budgeting day, y’all.

And if you’re listening, and you’re thinking, I don’t need a budget— I don’t want a budget. I hope she doesn’t talk about f**king Mint again or any of those other budgeting apps that you’ve tried, and then you used for two whole weeks, and then decided, heck this. I’m not even interested in this. Keep listening. Do me a solid and just listen anyway. Because I promise you, even if you do not get out of this an entire budgeting system, chances are you might learn some pretty sweet tips and tricks that you can use to modify your existing system or even start to implement some better habits without necessarily overhauling every aspect of your financial life.

So budgeting, this is one of those things that I have always disliked. I’ve never— uh, I’ve always been very fortunate to be in a situation where I haven’t had to do it or in a situation where— you know, when you’re in college, you don’t have a ton of money. So it’s not like— you know, it’s not like I was necessarily like playing around with a bunch of money or being super proactive about where it went. Because I didn’t need to do that.

After being in school for many, many years, when I finally got a job, I was fortunate. I had a master’s in business. And so my first job out of grad school was fairly well paying. It wasn’t, you know, through the roof or anything. But it was definitely more money than I had ever had. And so I didn’t— again, I found myself in a situation where I didn’t really need to budget.

So I kind of grew up being good with money, but not formally. I never really made budget spreadsheets. I didn’t track my expenses. I didn’t have anything that I stuck to. All of that changed for me when I made the decision to quit my job. I was working as a consultant for financial advisors. I was doing all kinds of like marketing for other advisors, basically, and decided that wasn’t for me and that I wanted to become a financial advisor myself.

And that required a little bit of a transition. So it was January of 20— what year is it now? 20— we’re in 2019. So it would’ve been January of 2017 where I quit my job, which is crazy to me. That’s like over two years ago.

I took six months. And I freelanced while wrapping up the third part of the CFA exam. That’s chartered financial analyst. And then I didn’t really start my new job as an advisor until July. So there was a full six-month period where I had gone from like a consultant’s salary to basically casually building the occasional website, doing a little bit of social media here and there.

[00:10:02] I wasn’t hardly— you know, my big focus was passing this exam. So I wasn’t picking up a ton of work. Um, I was fortunate that I had an emergency fund. But all of a sudden, my old spending habits went completely out the window. My old ability to spend, my old ability to get a paycheck and just casually pay off my credit card, no big deal, all of that stuff suddenly was not going to work anymore.

And it took me a month or so to realize that. It definitely got to the point where I didn’t really make the changes immediately right after I left. I still had, you know, a little bit of money in my checking account. And so I was spending pretty freely, but quickly realized, this is not going to work for me. This is not an option.

So I started to think about ways that I could control my spending without having to track every penny. For me, this is like the crux of the issue, right? Any system that requires me to save receipts, enter data every single day or even every single week, anything that requires me to constantly check in on an app on my phone or anything like that, whether it is digital or pen and paper, like tracking is tracking to me. And those are not particularly useful for me.

So I needed to give myself guidelines. I needed a way of understanding the framework of my money without having to hyperanalyze all of the little bitty transactions. So over the course of my time implementing this budgeting system, I learned a ton about how budgeting works, what the different options are.

And one kind of system of budgeting that really stuck out to me as being useful is something called reverse budgeting. So normally the idea with budgeting, we think of our budget often in the way of, you know, the way that businesses think of their cash flow. We’ve got income or money coming in. We’ve got expenses or money coming out.

And then anything left over at the end of the month is savings. If you’re a business owner, anything left over at the end of the month is profit. So savings, profit, kind of functionally the same thing in this case, in this type of equation.

Reverse budgeting is really nice because it says, let’s actually put savings on the other side of the equation. So let’s not treat savings as an afterthought. Let’s actually make sure that that’s prioritized. And let’s also separate what is a bill with what is spending money. So let’s separate our bills, and let’s separate our spending money.

So whereas the old budgeting equation looked a little bit like income minus expenses equals savings, the new budgeting equation would look a little something like income minus bills minus savings goals equals everything else. So in theory, if you’ve got your income, and you’ve accounted for your bills, all the stuff that comes out on a regular basis, if you’ve accounted for your savings goals, what you’re trying to actually achieve and be a little bit proactive with it, in theory if you’ve accounted for those two things, like everything else is gravy. You can spend that on whatever you want.

Because you’ve kind of already checked the other big adult boxes. You’ve got your rent paid. You’ve got your savings goals on lock. So technically, anything else is free to spend. So when I started to think about budgeting in this context instead, I will be honest. It really, really changed the way that I think about it.

It really opened up my eyes to me to say, well, look, it’s not like I can’t have spending money. I would argue that everybody needs a little bit of spending money. I think that depends heavily on what your budget looks like. But there’s something so empowering of even having  just a little bit every week or every month that says, this is completely mine. And I can do whatever I want with it. That’s such an empowering feeling.

So this is sort of the framework of how I approach budgeting. And so I wanna offer you sort of like five key tenets of the Young Scrappy budgeting system. So this is like, in a nutshell, the five biggest philosophical beliefs that I have about budgeting.

So the first one is figure out how much your monthly predictable expenses are. So I’ll kind of unpack this for you a little bit. Monthly predictable expenses, the first word here obviously is monthly. So for most of us, you know, a lot of our bills happen on a monthly basis. Rent or mortgage, any debt payments, most insurance, utilities, most of that stuff happens on a monthly basis. That’s sort of the unit of time that most bills function under.

[00:14:53] However, there are plenty of other things that happen more frequently than monthly— all your weekly items or biweekly. Then you’ve got your whole set of less frequent items. And I’ve found that it’s actually the less frequent items, that’s the stuff that really trips us up. That’s the stuff that sneaks up on us.

All of a sudden, holy crap, $350 due to the CFA Institute in July of 2017, which is what happened to young Michelle the freelancer. Amazon Prime, $119 a year. My car insurance is actually paid twice a year. It’s $500. But, you know, that’s something closer to like $90 a month if you were to scale it.

So when you figure out your monthly predictable expenses, I would consider— you know, don’t just think of the things that are monthly. Think of the things that are yearly and maybe divide those by 12 to get a monthly amount. Think of the things that happen twice per year and divide those by six to get a monthly amount and so on.

So this way, you’re not just considering, what are the things that I know I’m on the hook for this month? Think of the stuff that your future self always forgets, the stuff that you auto-renew once a year. That’s the stuff that creeps up on us. And that’s not to say that, you know, $119 from Prime is super, super expensive.

But, look, if you have that hit at a bad time, you have kind of a low income month, something happens, you know, that can actually be pretty problematic. And certainly if you have more than one of those items, that can be hundreds of dollars a year that you’re just flat out not including in your budget. So monthly expenses, I say monthly. But make sure that you’re also capturing the other stuff and kind of scaling it.

And then predictable expenses, so notice that I’m not saying needs. Notice that I’m not saying wants. I’m saying predictable. So in my world, if I’m thinking about something like an electric bill, that happens every month. And I need it to keep the lights on.

But then there’s this other thing that happens every single month, and it’s called Netflix. And I love it. And it’s only $13. And it’s totally worth paying for, in my personal opinion. And even though it is a want, chances are I use it enough that I’m not gonna cancel it.

So I’m not gonna treat it like this afterthought. I’m just gonna include it in my regular bills. I’m just gonna put it in there as a monthly predictable expense. So take some time and figure out how much all of those cost for you per month. Just make a big list. Put down either the monthly amount or scale your items to a monthly amount if it’s less frequent.

Just add them up and see what you get. You never know until you try it. I would recommend going back through bank statements and seeing whether there are items you might have missed. And as you’re going through this exercise, it’s just a really fantastic opportunity to also cancel the stuff you’re not using.

So when I did this exercise for the first time, I definitely had that, welp, holy crap, can’t believe I’m spending $50 on a gym membership. Haven’t been to the gym in six weeks. Time to let that go. So take some time and do that as well. So that’s the first sort of tenet is make sure that you know how much your monthly predictable expenses are.

The second is clearly define your savings goals. So this is the other part of budgeting that we so frequently leave off. We’re so focused on, what are our needs? And what are our wants? And what’s happening this month? That we forget to focus on our savings goals. If you are a listener of this podcast, you’ll know that I’m really big on defining some smart savings goals. I’m really big on giving them a dollar amount and figuring out, you know, if I want to save $600 in six months, that means I need to do $100 a month to get there on time.

So when I say clearly define your savings goals, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’m talking about taking the time to write down what it is you want to accomplish, how much per month you need to get there, and kind of adding those things up, and treating them like line items in your budget. So if you really wanna do all those things, they kinda have to be integrated with the rest of your spending.

You can’t have all of your savings goals out there on an island and just assume that that stuff’s gonna magically happen for itself. If you figure out how to make it magically happen, please let me know. I will interview you for this podcast. And we will talk about that kind of wizardry.

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MICHELLE: All right. So that was the second, clearly define your savings goals. Now, when I just talked about the new budgeting equation, remember I said you’ve got your income. You’re taking out your monthly predictable expenses. You’re taking out your savings goals. And then technically everything else is free to spend.

So my third tenet of the Young Scrappy budgeting system, or my third recommendation for you, is figure out how much spending money you can actually afford in that month. So in the simplest example, we’ll just consider this an absolute hypothetical. Let’s say your take-home pay is $3,000 a month.

[00:20:10] If you have $1,000 a month in predictable expenses and $1,000 a month in savings goals, then that means you have $1,000 a month in spending money. Most people’s budgets don’t look like that. Most people don’t take home $3,000 and then save a full $1,000. If you are doing that, kudos to you. Totally here for it.

Just know that those are numbers that I chose because it is very early for me. My sweet brain does not do mental math well. And so $3,000 divided into three buckets of $1,000 is the very best example that I could come up with right now.

But just to show you what that looks like again, you know, you’ve got your income. You’re pulling out your monthly predictable expenses. You’re pulling out your savings goals. And then everything else is free to spend.

So when I say spending money, here’s what I mean. I mean spending money on all of the categories that tend to sneak up on us or that we have a lot of control over, things that are pretty flexible. For example, groceries, gas, dining out, shopping, random Amazon purchase, getting your nails done, buying concert tickets, these are all things that happen.

You know, some of them are more serious. Some of them are more fun. But we have a lot of control over those things. I would even argue that gas, like gas in your car, is a fairly flexible spending expense. It’s not easy to predict. We don’t always know what’s gonna happen.

Sometimes we fill up our tank, and we’re just topping off. And sometimes we’re like down at that engine light came on— not engine light. You know what I mean. The gas light came on. So even that is so variable that it’s hard to treat it like a regular budget item. And then goodness knows when I go fill up gas I like to also fill up my belly with [00:22:02 the sweet roll, or food], and the excellent sweet tea, or the frozen horchata at QT. Those are my favorite things.

So that too sort of takes this like necessity trip and turns it into something discretionary or something fun. I love having all of my variable items in one bucket. It’s really helpful for me to think of spending money as a lump sum rather than, well, this is my grocery money. And this is my shopping money. And this is my dining out money.

You’ll notice that a lot of apps out there— so again, Mint, I’m so sorry, Mint. If you’re listening to this, and you’re like either a Mint user or a Mint employee, I’m sorry I keep ripping y’all apart. But it is really hard for me to think about my spending in terms of, well, $200 a week is for groceries. And $50 a week is for cosmetics. And then $75 a month is for shoes.

That’s really hard for me because when I go shopping— let’s say I go to Target. And it’s three birds, one stone. I’m not in there on my Target receipt afterwards trying to allocate like, well, I technically spent this much money. But this portion was for this thing. And this portion was for this other thing.

That’s a huge headache. It’s a huge headache to track even one Target expense. It’s a bigger headache to try and break it out into all these little microcategories and figure out where everything’s living.

Rather, I like to know that I’m giving myself this parameter of, I’ve got my spending money. Technically, I can spend it on whatever I want. Obviously, there are things that I should buy, or I have to buy. Like I need gas in my car. And I need food in my fridge. Those are kind of like the two necessities of the spending money bucket.

But in any given week, my priorities are gonna change so drastically. And I think a flexible budget will help you stay on top of that. So take, for example— let’s say you’re giving yourself $200 a week as part of your spending money. Then one week, you might have a friend who has a birthday. You need to go out to dinner. You need to buy them a present. That week, you probably won’t be going and doing a ton of shopping for yourself. That’s totally fine.

There might be another week where you have an event. You need to buy new clothes. You need to buy a new pair of pants. Your zipper breaks. You gotta go get an emergency pair of pants. Again, at that point, you might not be going out to dinner as much if it’s an expensive pair of pants.

On the other hand, you might decide one week that you don’t really wanna do any shopping. You have no need to buy anything random. And so you’re gonna go out to dinner a little bit extra. Or, you’re gonna buy fancier groceries. Or, let’s say that week you have a road trip. And you’re gonna spend a lot of money on gas and a lot of money on kind of food.

Again, that’s the money where you probably wouldn’t buy gifts for people. You probably wouldn’t shop. You probably wouldn’t, you know, do all of those little discretionary things. So in any given week, our priorities vary widely. And so giving yourself a set number just for the week is a really great way to make that happen.

[00:24:58] And in case I didn’t make this clear, I should say when we know that everything else is free to spend, and we kind of do this back of the napkin math to get a monthly amount, I like to use that information to give myself a weekly allowance. It’s just really helpful for me. If I know that I have $600 spending money for the month, it’s not gonna be easy for me to spend that evenly kind of in a 30-day period.

I will spend the first week of that month living large. I will cut back for weeks two and three. And I will basically be flat broke for week four. That’s how my brain works. I’m a financial advisor by trade. I am very good with money. But I also know that I don’t have a ton of self-control when it comes to that kind of thing. I have to give myself external parameters.

And so what I like to do then— if I know, for example, I have $600 a month, super simplistically, divide by four, you know, approximately four weeks in a month. I know that I have $150 a week. To me, that really changes the math.

It’s a completely paradigm to look at your bank account or to look at your budget and say, OK, I just got paid. There’s all this money in my account. I can spend it on whatever I want versus it’s my weekly allowance. I started with $150 for the week. I have $73.16 to get me through the next four days. Do I really wanna buy this thing?

It completely changes your decision making process. So know that once you’ve accounted for your predictable expenses and savings goals, everything else is free to spend. Use that information to give yourself a weekly allowance.

The fourth tenet I will recommend to you, or the fourth key point of the Young Scrappy budgeting system, separate your bank accounts for that bills pile and the spending money pile. So most of us have one checking account and one savings account. The problem with having one checking account is we’re constantly trying to play the game of, again, I just got paid.

I know I have bills coming up. So let me look at my calendar. And what do I need to save money for? And then mentally, like mental mathy, what else is left? How much is actually free to spend?

And we’re having to do this calculation really frequently. It’s really messy because we so frequently forget bills. Most of us don’t have a formal bills calendar or anything like that. So that’s a little bit of a challenge to figure out how much is actually free to spend in the moment.

However, let’s say you did all the math that we just talked about. You got out a spreadsheet or a bar tab or something, and you used the back of the receipt or whatever. I do a lot of my best work on the backs of receipts. That’s a fact. So let’s say you’ve gone through this process. You’ve done all the math.

You’ve figured out what you need to have as your weekly allowance. At this point, you don’t wanna have to track it. I found the best way to avoid tracking is to give it its own separate checking account. One checking account is not sufficient. Don’t keep all your money in a pile. Try and separate it out into those two little piles.

The great thing about having two checking accounts— and some of you might push back on this because it feels complicated, or your bank might have really exorbitant fees. That’s totally fine. You might have to do a little bit of research in that case. However, I would say that the second checking account is really instrumental in making sure that your weekly allowance is separated.

I like to set up an autopay even. My existing checking account, when I first started this system, everything else was kind of like hooked up to one checking account. Like I had all of my systems in place. And so for me, opening up a second checking account was fairly easy. I didn’t have to reroute anything.

Again, obviously if you switch banks, it’s gonna be a lot more of a pain. But the second checking account was not particularly difficult to open. They gave me a separate debit card. And then, once a week— I chose Sundays because that’s my personal scheduling preference. Every Sunday morning at 6:00 AM, I transfered my weekly allowance over to my separate debit card.

So throughout the week, as I was spending down my money, I had one card to clearly do it from, one card that was for bills, and one card that was for casual spending. So this just made it so much easier on myself. I didn’t have to track everything. I just opened up my bank account. I knew exactly how much spending money was still left on my card for the week.

And again, it really changed the— not just how I was thinking about spending, but also the framework for how I was approaching it. So it just became so much easier to stick to because it was almost entirely automated. I didn’t have to worry about the little categories. I only had to worry about the big picture.

And then just keeping the money separate in a bank account completely eliminated the need for tracking. So I highly, highly recommend that. That was number four. Separate your bank accounts for bills versus spending money. Make sure that you don’t have to track all the details.

The final thing that I’ll recommend to you in terms of budgeting, give each savings goal their own account too when you can. I think our savings suffer from an issue where we put everything in one pile because, again, we want simplicity. We wanna look at our bank accounts and see how organized it is.

[00:30:10] The flip side to this is you also open up your savings account, and you have no idea what the money is for. It’s for this thing and that thing and this trip and that new roof and emergencies, which you can tell me what constitutes an emergency. I have made up a lot of bulls**t emergencies in my day to justify getting out my savings.

Instead, I like to think about what savings goals you have. Give all of the really big, important ones their own separate savings account. Label that savings account clearly. And that way, as you’re making those monthly transfers to fund the goals, the money is stacking up in there.

You know exactly how much is available for that trip to Mexico. You know how much is available for your home renovations coming up. Whatever it is that you’re planning for, you have clearly defined boundaries and guidelines about where that money should go.

Now, I do a lot of work with this budgeting system. And it tends to be pretty in depth. I have worked with people for hours and hours to really implement it, understand it, figure out the spending. And so this really is designed to be an overview. I mean, this podcast is kind of just the quick 25 minutes, you know, how to get started, how to think about your budget a little bit differently.

So if you have questions or anything, you know, definitely let me know. I’m happy to try and follow up. If I get enough questions, maybe I’ll do a weird little like budgeting masterclass podcast a few months from now or something like that.

You can find me on the emails at [email protected]. That’s [email protected]— Michelle with two Ls like the Beatles song, the way that name was designed to be. Sorry, one L Micheles, anyone who’s listening. Go ahead and shoot me an email if you have questions.

Or, just drop a line and say hey. Tell me about your savings goals. Tell me about what’s worked for you. If you have any budget tips for me, I’m happy to always consider those, use those. I love passing on the knowledge. I love incorporating other people’s ideas. I think that that stuff is super fun.

So anyway, that is my budgeting 101. I told you that I would— I would lay it all out for you. And hopefully, you have some ideas, things that— even if you’re not doing everything like I said, maybe just try giving yourself a little bit of a weekly allowance. Maybe just try the two checking account system. Maybe try breaking out your savings goals into separate accounts.

Maybe go back through your existing budget and figure out all of the annual expenses that you forgot. Maybe go back through and do your savings goals. So don’t feel like you have to tackle everything at once. It’s not a big race. But go ahead and start to implement some of these things if you can.

Anyway, if this got published on time, that means it’s Friday. I hope if you’re listening, you just have a f**king fantastic weekend. I hope you have the best weekend that has ever been weekended.

That’s a lot of pressure. I didn’t mean that. No pressure. Just like have a nice weekend. I hope you— I hope you really do. So until next time, take care. I love you. Bye.

END CREDITS I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Young Scrappy Money podcast. If you want to read about my work as a financial advisor and financial coach, you can do so at www.youngandscrappy.com. That’s www.youngandscrappy.com. Thanks again for listening.