Tools Needed to Start Budgeting

Hey, everybody. Good morning. How are y'all? Today is Thursday, it is Coffee Chats with Candicee. And today we are going to talk about some budgeting tools. So let's get started. Grab your cup of coffee, I filled mine to the brim today. So grab a cup of coffee or beverage of your choice, no judgment here, and that includes your finances, too. And let's chat some budgeting tools. 

You really don't need a lot of things to get started. You certainly don't have to purchase anything. You can use what you have or you can find low cost things that can help you.  

For those that don't know me, my name is Candice Montgomery, I'm the founder of Monetize Your Dream, a course for new and aspiring women entrepreneurs, and Beginner's Guide to Budgeting. I help everyday people like you learn how to budget so that they can pay off their debt, save money and experience financial confidence. 

The things we want to talk about today are your tools for budgeting. You want to use your iPad, your computer, you can use a notepad, like a notebook paper, and then you can use your pen. I do, (I'm having to show two cameras), so I do have pens. And then also highlighter, you can have multiple color highlighters. So if you're looking at your bank statement, you can highlight your expenses, as you know, your monthly expenses, which are recurring all the time, then you can highlight your income as a different color. And so you can have different colors so that you can sort it out and be able to see it more easily. The other thing is I prefer a pencil because I like to do be able to erase if I need to, because I constantly am changing things. So gonna have a calculator; I have a little handy dandy calculator. And thent once I do my budget, I have these great little teller slips that my VA Savannah made for me. I've been just using paper. I've just been taking a piece of paper and folding it in force, and then just handwriting it. So I do this every month, whenever we go get paid to take out the cash. I count out the the bills and the coins that I need in order to be able to do my cash envelope, and then I'll just attach it, I'll just stick it on my withdrawal slip and send it in. So I have that and then I have talked about cash envelopes is that you can do a premade cash envelope like this. So where you put your cash inside the envelope, and then you would treat this like a check register. Again, some of you might not know what a check register is, but with this one, you just put the date, the the amount or what it is for and then the amount, and then you use your columns to deduct. And when you run out, when you run the zero for the month, then you can't spend any more in that account. So I'll put that a little closer so you can see for there. And then I'll put a little closer for this camera so you can see for there. The other thing you can do and completely free is that you can use the envelopes from your bank that you get your cash in, and then just write what it is on there and then write on the back, maybe what you spend it on and the date, and you can ask for a handful of these from the bank and then they’ll give them to you or you can just save them every time you get them. And what I do with these is, I end up when my monthly stuff goes in my cash envelope like this, then I use these for things that are long term cash things that I need to do, like an annual expense or something like that, that I might be building up every month. That way I can not put it in here and create one entry in here and I think that's wasteful. I use these and then when I'm done with them, I just tear them up and then I'm done. 

So we've got pens, pencils, highlighters sticky notes calculator. So the other thing I did use is a binder. So this is my budget binder. And what I would do is, in my budget, [ I would try to show this to you the easiest way I can. ] And my budget, I would put the month, and then the things that are highlighted are the things that are paid for in cash. And so then I go through it, once I had printed it off, I go through it, I added the cash and then this is how I would then put the mark the cash on the end. So I would I would do it like that. So the sticky note, you can see, it's a lot easier. I've moved to a digital version of that. I save my budget, I use a zero based budget, and I save my budget as a PDF. And when I do that, then I'll go in and highlight with my mouse, I can highlight, I use Adobe, so I can highlight it, and then I can see which ones that I have for cash. 

The other thing I do is I keep the receipts also, or the monthly bills like a water bill or the electric bill is what I did in any other receipts that we spend. But I don't do that anymore. Because now, like I said, I do it digitally. So everything is either emailed to me and I save that on my iCloud Drive. That way, I can go back and look at it if I need to, whenever I get a new bill and I try to do everything electronically, but when I get a new bill and if it's something paper that I need to scan in, I'll scan it, I'll put it in the the budget for the month, and then then I'll be able to calculate it and then go there. And look before I do my budget for the month, like entering my numbers and everything, to know that I have that bill to pay. 

What else? See. Budgeting is personal. You have to find what is going to work for you. Because if you don't find something that works for you, you're not going to do it, and it takes a little bit of time to get used to it. I want to make sure that you give yourself grace, it takes you about three months before you get used to doing your budget and getting it right, and you're gonna make mistakes, and it's okay, so just give yourself grace with that. But once you get it going, you're just going to see the tremendous difference that it's going to make, it's going to change your world. You have to prioritize what you have to put what's priority to you. And then you have to make a habit of it, especially in that first three months, you have to make a habit of looking at it every single day so that you can keep up with it. Are there things coming out that you didn't know about? So that you're not caught up at the end of the month? Then you want to enter into your budget, your transaction that you did. So did you overspend? That way you can kind of start working on getting that corrected and budgeting more effectively. These tools worked for me, and they can work for you, or you can find something of your own that works better. 

If you want to schedule a discovery call with me. I'll put the link up here. And then you can go there and schedule a call with me, and we could talk about your finances, what you need help with, how I can serve you and help you change your world, because this is life changing! And just as a follow up, I and my husband, we spent seven years and we paid off over $450,000 and we made a lot of changes in our life and life is so different now. And so I want that joy and that peace for you guys. So if you want to schedule a call with me, click on the link in the comments, and I will be looking forward to hearing from you. 

So that's all I got for today. So I will see you guys next Thursday. Sorry I missed y'all last Thursday, I had a launch last week or the week before, and so I was really recovering from that. I've launched my budget workshop. And yeah, I was like, skipping my live. I was a slacker, sorry.  Anyway, I will see y'all here next Thursday at 10am for Coffee Chats with Candice. And I'm going to try to start being able to plan the rest of the month out so that y'all can see what I'm going live about. If y'all have any questions, let me know in the comments, and I look forward to being able to help in any way I can. Alright. Alright, so thanks, guys. Have a great day!