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We’ve tried and failed at a lot of budgets over the years. Here are some of our failures as well as what we are learning about budgeting at the moment.
Transcription:
Hey guys, it’s Ryan here from on property. We are just driving home from, we’ve been at a local farm where they do coffee and stuff like that. And so we’re driving home at the moment, kills driving. Is this the first time in over 500 episodes that you’ve actually been on? So this is my wife Kelly and these are my kids. We go Sasha, Branson and we got lots. And so I thought I’ll just take this time as we’re driving through the hinterland, pretty gorgeous spot up here to talk about some of our budgeting fails that we’ve had over the years. There have been so, so many things that we’ve tried that just basically haven’t worked and now I’m like a new budgeting plan and whether or not that’ll work. It’s definitely not waking for definitely over budget this way, but by, by about 30 percent. Um, so let’s go back to when we first got married. I’m trying to remember what our budgeting blank, $70.
Everything except for like rent and electricity. Anything else you wanted to do with $70? And then for awhile we had, and we would put this cash in envelopes and we’d be like, this is our man. Okay. So I think that first we tried the envelope one where people told me you get old cash out and then you can only use what’s in that envelope with that, so you’d have like $40 for petrol and that’s it. And so that didn’t work because we couldn’t drive much that week and then we’d want to buy coffee or something. And so we’d always be like taking from one envelope to pay for something else and then we’d be, then we wouldn’t take enough cash and we’d have no money to buy that.
Or you would, um, be trying to buy something online, like all you’ve got is cash in envelopes and so that really wouldn’t work. So cash in envelopes well from side of the road, not today. So, um, cash in envelopes, that didn’t work. I wouldn’t work going forward anyway. Now because everything is completely outdated now. We do online shopping for woolworths, we buy clothes for the kids online because there’s no shops around up here to actually buy good stuff. Um, so that wouldn’t work. So then we went to the amount of money per day and this was back in the days where what I was working maybe four days a week at mobile. I think I had stepped it up to four, but I’ll still any hobby and you weren’t working because we had just had sasha, we didn’t have much money at all. We were so poor and we, the envelope thing had filed so we decided to do a daily daily budget. So it’s like well you get $70 a day or $69 a day, why do we even choose that?
What does it mean? And then that was subtle hot as well because then you kind of like buy bulk of anything. Like if something’s on special it doesn’t matter. Like you can’t buy it, you just have what you have and you just buy like one bag of rice and like a couple of things that went with it and you can’t buy for tomorrow. So we are always at the shop and then we had young kids, I was a little bit by then so it just wasn’t practical even like filling out petro and you couldn’t fill the tank up because it would be. We always did and so that didn’t work for us. And then what else did we do?
Are we, what we were budgeting until we could afford to not or we just had a budget budget, budget, budget, but then we would sit down and write all of our expenses and everything, but then we just, we didn’t, we didn’t have enough money to even do what we wanted to do. I think neither of us are the people that really want to give up a lot of things. We even with over budget this week. Right. And we’d go to this for Joel found this awesome organic farm and they’ve got like a concert that they had that was sold out and they’re doing another one in a couple of months and it’s going to sell out as well. But there’s tickets at the moment. So it was like $70 for a family ticket.
I’m doing that, I’m paying for that because that’s going to sell out and I can’t wait until the budget resets tomorrow. Well, I probably could, but I think that’s the thing. It’s like we can see the value that experience will have that. So we just throw the budget out the window. We do that because you know, it would make us happy. Doing those things makes us happy and that happiness thing is so important to us now. I think for a long time because we hardly ever fight but we do fight when we have new money and we only ever worst fights it just about money. So I think that’s of why we been watching for a long time as well. We just made it so unhappy.
We’re not crazy. Like when we said we don’t budget, we still understand that we are a $70 ticket, go out for breakfast and we’ll spend $3 on breakfast instead of making coffee at home. So it’s nothing crazy. So. Oh and then so after the daily one then we went onto the APP and so we had a weekly amount. After all our bills are paid, so phone, Internet, electricity, that sort of stuff. Then we would have weekly discretionary money. Could you just spend a little bit quieter? No. Um, yeah. So then we went to, we went to a weekly amount that we would have and then we would track it in the iphone APP that I’ve shared on the channel in the past spending app which was pretty good and I feel like we would do that for about a month or so and it would work and then we would just, all one of us would stop. You didn’t go and then you would, you would also have like he’d be out with the three kids, like you guys can hear them yell, like wrangling three children and you’re buying something and then I get lost all. They’re like harassing you because you bought like apple juice and get apple juice. Muxy machine that he doesn’t have a pencil and a grandson. Could he place given the pencils so we can record it.
Okay. Sorry about that. So yeah, so we had that and that was good, but then we just wouldn’t enter it or like I was the worst, I think it was definitely that wouldn’t enter it and so that didn’t work. And so now we’ve moved on to um, the same sort of strategy so we have a weekly amount but we’re using the strategy from the barefoot investor where you set up different accounts for different things. And so we now have, because we only ever had the one account plus a credit card that we would spend stuff on. So all of our, all of everything builds all our spending and stuff would come off the one account and you would just lose track of how much we spend and income would come in weekly. Sometimes fortnightly. That’d be monthly checks and stuff as well. Yeah, like we would just always say like it’s just all the same pot.
So now we have two accounts, so we have more of a calling the pot, which is where everything, all the income goes in or the bills coming out. And then we have a separate account that’s like its own island. And that’s called the spending account and so we move money over each week into that and we’re only allowed to spend out of that. How’s that working? It’s like as long as you don’t do anything, do you need to go to bed? Can you stop yelling? Please see, like you say beautiful instagram photo with a cycle in the car going to the farm, I wouldn’t be perfect. And then you guys are getting the real life right here. This is what happens when we drive, when we drive to school. It’s like this stuff.
So the good thing about the having the one account is that you know when you’ve reached your limit, because there’s no money in the account, it’s decline when you’re at the checkout. So you know, okay, we’re spending our money for the week and then I have to then move money over and I know how much extra I’m moving over. So without tracking it in the iphone APP, we know how much openly, honestly, because I know how much I put extra into account. And even then, I think it’s a really good gauge for us to say, well, if we can’t do it in our budget, we need time or money. It goes down to me to be like, okay, Ryan, you can make more money, do you know what I mean?
And then you’re selling me as well so then we can get more done so we can probably make it. I’m viewing the going over the budget because we just gave. Well we’re also approaching it the way that we’ve approached your veganism, which is that we just do one thing at a time. So I moved to becoming a vegetarian about three years ago, but I had slowly cut down meat incidentally before I became a vegetarian just because I didn’t like cooking and kill me because he didn’t want to cook it. And you’re like, they wanted you to be like, if you want mate you can cook it. And then I was like, I have the bolded eventually like place, let’s see. Not too loud. Thanks. Yeah. And then so we became vegetarian and then we’re like, okay, we eventually want to become vegans. But rather than going hardcore, because we both don’t like cooking either. We didn’t have many Vegan recipes, so we’re just slowly cut things out. What did we cut out first? I can’t even remember.
She’s I have cheese and spaghetti and stuff, so we would find a substitute fast before I told the kids they can’t have anything. We found a substitute first and they tried it and they tried a few different things until they can send me that they liked it didn’t matter. The parmesan cheese and we just, yeah, you subsequently change your diet so that you don’t need it. And then we will having honey and then we decided to cut that out and replace it with maybe the way that it a budget. Is that the way we approached it was rather than just going hardcore Vegan, we’re going to cut everything out. We’re going to be perfect Vegan people. Is that all? We’re vegetarians, we’re doing our best. And then one thing at a time, this is going to be a longterm lifestyle decision for us that we’re going to do this.
And so I feel like with budgeting it’s the same thing, like this is really since we got all the cards and the new accounts, this is like our first week doing this. So even though like we’re not going to be perfect this week or next week or the week after or next month, you spend your money on today, you have a choice what you want to buy, what you want, and then getting better at and working out what’s important to you. So rather than going out, because our budget resets on Sunday, so rather than going out Sunday morning and dropping $50 on coffee and breakfast and everyone’s saying, okay, well that $50 could buy you a new top or it could by who shares this week, so we got to buy.
So it’s kind of like, well, okay, well we could go and do that, but what else do we do with that money? And then also thinking about what’s going to buy you more happiness so you can have anything you want but you can’t have everything you want. So then looking at money and saying, okay, which what are we going to spend our money on that it’s going to make us the happiest this week? And so we’re in the process of working that out, but I feel like we get there. So yeah, so that’s some of our budgeting files as well as some of the things that we’re learning at the moment. Welcome Kelly to the channel. You might say some more of a coming in the future and welcome the kids as well who were super quiet and just really lovely and just letting us record. Actually Sasha was also. She was quiet the entire time. I’ve seen proxies. Guys, that’s it from us today. Until next time, just stay positive.