This Budgeting Tool Reduces Overwhelm and Anxiety (Quick Money Mondays)

This budgeting tool has really helped me prepare for my future and minimise my overwhelm and anxiety and manage my finances. That is a cash flow calendar.

What is a cash flow calendar and how can you use one in your life?

0:29 – What is a cash flow calendar?
1:40 – How do you create a cash flow calendar?
3:27 – What to do once you’ve created your cash flow calendar
5:34 – How this helps relieve my anxiety and prepare for my future

Recommended Videos:

How I Got Myself Into Debt

How I Am Paying Off Debt

Transcription:

Ryan 0:03
hi ryan here from onproperty.com.au helping you achieve financial freedom in today’s episode i want to talk about a budgeting tool that has really really helped me over the last couple of months to prepare for my future to minimize my overwhelm and anxiety and just really helped me to manage my finances and that is a cash flow calendar so in this episode i’m going to talk about what a cashflow calendar is and how you can use one in your life so what is a cashflow calendar uh well it is basically what it sounds like it’s a calendar of the year where you map out your cash flow so you map out your incoming income and you map out your outgoing expenses as well so as you’ll know that there are things throughout the year that you don’t have to pay every single week or every single month but you have to pay them in one lump sum maybe once a year maybe twice a year whatever it may be so something like car registration is a perfect example where it tends to come around once a year for most of us you can do it six months as well and if you’re not expecting this and you get hit with a bill for car registration or for health insurance or for whatever it may be and you haven’t put the money aside then that can put you in a really difficult financial position so taking the time to create a cash flow calendar has been really useful for me both with my expenses as well as my plan to pay off debt and can be really useful for you as well so how do you create a cash flow calendar well for me what i did was i jumped into excel and i created an excel document i actually use google sheets because it’s free and easy to use and i can access it from any website i mean from any computer and so basically go into google sheets and i would create the 12 months of the year and then down the column the first column i would just list all my major expenses so i would list my car registration i would list car insurance health insurance i would also list monthly expenses as well so like internet and my phone bill quarterly expenses like electricity and gas bills as well as something that you would put in there and then for me as well i also listed my debt repayment so when i have to pay back certain debts when i have to pay interest which is monthly as well as when i have to pay the full amount of particular debt as well so basically i took the time to map out across the entire year what all of my major expenses will be as well as what my ongoing expenses are so things like i have a weekly discretionary budget so i have a certain amount of money that i give to myself each week that i can spend on things like petrol food going out etc i put that into the cash flow calendar as well as a monthly figure so basically i spend the time to map out my entire year and that gave me totals for each and every month as well as totals for the entire year and that then allows you to prepare for the coming months so if i can see that this month i don’t have many expenses and i’ve got a bit of extra money but i know that registration is coming up in four months time then i can prepare for that and say okay do i have enough money to pay for registration and so once i’ve created my cash flow calendar what i then do is look at all of my major expenses and look at how much do i need to save in order to be able to pay for those expenses so i put it i put them all into a chunk that i call big bills and i basically work out that annual figure for big bills and then i try and save that amount each week as i get paid from my business or each month as i get paid so what i do after i’ve created my cash flow calendar i work out that full amount how much i need to put aside each week and then i go ahead and automate that so when my income comes in what i’ve set up is an automatic scheduled payment in my img bank account that immediately takes money out of my bank account and puts it into an online savings account in order to save up for big bills and so basically i have an online savings account called big bills and money goes in there each and every week and then when a bill comes up like when car registration comes up and i need to pay 800 or $1,000 or whatever it may be i can then pull money out of big bills put it in my spending account and then i can pay for that bill so i created the cash flow calendar i created an automated the weekly saving of the money that i need to pay for the bills in my life and what you could also do as well is take this a further step and you could actually pay yourself first in terms of saving so if you’re saving for a deposit if you’re trying to pay have your home line if you’re saving in order to invest then what you can do is automate this as well and in your cash flow calendar in your schedule you can put your own investment money in there as well or your savings in there as well so maybe you want to save 10% of your income or you want to save 20% of your income put that monthly in your cash flow calendar and then automate that in your bank account as well so when you’re paid money is automatically taken out and put into your savings account so you don’t have to think about it so for me as you know i’m paying off a lot of debt this year and my debt some of the debt has due dates on it of when i need to pay it so being able to map that out in a cash flow calendar has been so helpful and just completely relieves so much anxiety for me because i don’t need to worry about what’s coming up and will i be able to afford to pay it i can look at my calendar every single day if i want to or whenever i want to and i can see okay what exactly is due this month do i have enough money in order to pay for my bills this month when the answer is yes then i’ll look at okay what’s happening next month do i have enough money to pay the bills and the debt that are coming next month and the month after that etc so i can really put a plan in place to prepare for the future to pay for my payment and really stay on top of that so i do suggest just go ahead it’s super easy to do just go into google sheets january february march april may all the way through to december in the different columns and then you know down the first column with the rows you can just put all your major expenses super easy to map out over the course of the year so cash flow the calendar has massively helped me i hope that this idea helps you as well in your budgeting and in your investment goals while you’re here go ahead and check out my previous quick money monday videos i did one video where i talked about how i got myself into debt that was a really popular one i’ll link up to that one as well as how i plan to get out of debt so i’ll link out to those two episodes otherwise until next time stay positive