Listener Budgeting Tips: Roundup #1

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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, onto number three from nick in the email, a dedicated spending account. This is the thing that came out when I was talking with ben everingham in that episode is having this dedicated spending account.

That’s something that I don’t have at the moment. I just have one account. Everything goes in and comes out of that one account and I try and manage it through the app, but I think having this dedicated spending account is going to be key for us and so you just put your discretionary money in that. So back to nick, he says dedicated spending account or transfer myself 200 bucks a week to a separatE accoUnt to live off for the week. That’s from barefoot influence and he uses that for groceries, fuel eating out in any ad hoc purchases. If I run out of money in a week to bad, dig deep, open up the cupboard and make it work. So this forces me to live within or rather below my means. So I really liked this idea of having this dedicated spending account and that you only had that amount of money and if you run out you’ve got to dig deep.

But I also would like to add to that, if you run out of money, dig deep to make extra money and then use that extra money or cash to continue to live the week. So if you run out, find a way to make an extra 50 bucks, get something for free of country and resell it, sell some of your old stuff, that sort of thing, or maybe do something within your business or a side gig to earn some extra money on the side. ANd so rather than just trying to live below your means, also tryIng to expand your means as well. So that’s something that we’re going to do. Me and my wife will be opening a separate spending account this week. So look forward to updates on that. And then number four is an automatic sweep. So set up an automatic sweep on the credit card.

So all reoccurring bills, internet, water, electricity, gas, phone rates, insurance goes onto the credit card. And the automatic sweep wipes the balance back to zero the day before the interest is charged, which means you never pay the bank interest again. So the result money stays in his offset account for the longest possible time. So this is something that I’m looking at doing as well is basically you have at your regular expenses like your internet, your phone or this sort of stuff coming off your credit card and then pay it off so you don’t pay interest. So if you don’t have a credit card you could just do that with a regular account about credit cards. Obviously you get that 55 days interest free period or whatever it is. And so then that thousand dollars or $2,000 or whatever it is you can keep in a savings account or offset account until you have to pay it.

So it just kind of improves your cash flow a bit. So there’s the four points that nick gave us and then he goes onto say if I want to buy a new watch or a car servicing comes up, that money has to come from the $200 a week ing card. This forces me to go through the hard yards of saving in advance or going without something for a month. So I can afford it. So I guess the idea here is that you also save up a surplus so you’re not just so you’ve got pay yourself first, which is investments and long term sort of stuff. Then you’ve got probably a separate savings account where you’re saving up for the expenses like car servicing and stuff like that, and then you’ve got your weekly spending money. So either the weekly spending money comes out of that $200 a week or maybe if he only spends $150 one week, then extra $50 goes into that savings account.

I’m not sure exactly how he does it or how we’re going to do that. I’ve actually thought that through those ad hoc purchases that get expensive, like when your kid goes to the hospital and all of this sort of stuff, I will have to get back to you guys on that oNe. Um, who said he also cut alcohol out of his life completely when he saw how much it was costing me. Some relationships have passed me by because of this decision, but they’ve been replaced by more meaningful ones built on solid conversation in different usually free experiences. So this is a couple of ideas here as well is looking at your life and really expensive things that probably aren’t worth the amount of money that you’re spending on them. I know alcohol from time to time does get expensive for us during summer. I love my fat yaks and so would buy a case of fat yak and me and my wife would drink, you know, some fat jakks every now and then.

Not huge amounts but it’s $50 a case sort of thing and each time you’re drinking one beer, it’s $2. Fifty or $3 or something like that for every beer that you drink. And so let’s say I have two in one night and my wife has one then that’s, you know, $9 or $7 50 for one night where we could have drank water and probably been happier and healthier. So is it worth spending that money when you don’t have to? So that’s pretty cool. And also replacing with more meaningful experiences, so going out and doing things that are more cost effective and free, so going to the beach, going out on nature walks, doing some things that you love to do that don’t necessarily cost a great deal of money is really cool rather than just going out to a bar and where they’re charging $9 for coronas and buying five kroners that night or buying a bucket for 30 or 40 bucks and you’re spending $40, $100 going out with your friends when really you could go somewhere for free, have just as much fun or you could go out with someone else, do something for you to have just as much fun inside money.

So it’s about really thinking ahead of time of what you’re going to be doing and then trying to save money that way. So he said, we’re just finishing off here. If I could suggest one thing, it would be to track your expenses. This by itself should be motivation for most people to make a change with their spending. Certainly it was for me, the result. A 70 percent savings rate including mortgage repayments and a 10 percent tired if you’re still reading well done. My fiance is having hens night tea party at my house, so I was kicked out for the afternoon. She doesn’t even live with me yet, but she’s kicking me out of the house. Needless. Needless to say, I have some spare time on my hands right now. Keep pumping out the quality content and I’ll continue to download weekly. Very respectfully, nick, so I just want to give nick a massive thank you for this email and the tips that we’re in this email.

I found it very helpful myself, even just recording this episode and talking through this email has given me some ideas as well, so I absolutely love this. If you’re out there listening to this, watching this, reading this, and you’re thinking, I’ve got some tips that I think could be helpful, please email them to me. Ryan at on-property dot com dot a u. I love receiving your emails and I’ll be doing another list, not roundup in the future, talking about different ideas that people have sent me. I also had this other email, but they said, I don’t budget, I get paid fortnightly and have a direct debit set up to pay monthly into an to pay money into an online savings account, which I don’t touch in this way. I pay myself first. So really driving home. That idea of pay yourself first. I think that is the biggest principle when it comes to budgeting, that I can see is the fact that you just pay.

So first you don’t touch that money and that way you just force yourself to live off the rest. Don’t get in debt, but come up with creative solutions to live off the rest. That way your savings is already taken care of. It’s already done and your focus now becomes living off the rest. Rather than trying to live below your means and hopefully saving you’ve already saved. You don’t have to worry about it now. You just focus on your life. So I think paying yourself first is the biggest idea when it comes to budgeting. So if you only take one thing away, then take away. Pay yourself first. Well, I hope that you have enjoyed this episode on listener budgeting tips. Now, I don’t generally help people with budgeting. I help people find an invest in positive cash flow properties. So a shameless plug right now.

If you’re looking at investing in positive cash flow properties, but you’re struggling to find them, then go ahead and check out either my course on exactly how to do it yourself, how to find positive cash flow properties that’s an on-property dot com forward slash find. So in that course I show you about five or six different methods that I use to find positive cash flow properties online from the comfort of your own home. So check that out. If you want to learn to do it yourself at on-property dot com.eu forward slash find, or if you just want me to show you positive cash flow properties, I do have a subscription service where I send out a new positive cashflow property listing every single day that is currently on the market. So if you want someone to show them to you, then that would be the membership. Subscription service will be best for you. So you’ve got to on-property dot kondo you for session membership. If it sounds like you’re more interested in that one, and I will lead the links in the description down below. Thanks for tuning in today guys, and making it this far. I you the best in your budgeting, in your saving and your earning more money and your goal towards financial freedom. That’s it for me today. And until next time, stay positive.