December 28, 2024 • 20 mins
As we wrap up the year and look ahead to 2025, we wanted to gift you something special: a three-part bonus series called Budget Better. The first step is looking to the past which is not merely an exercise in self-criticism or guilt. Rather, it serves as a foundation for understanding our financial decisions and making intentional changes moving forward.
📘 Pre-order the book here
https://bit.ly/BWYL-podcast
💌 Want to save money and spend better in just 5 minutes? Get The Friendletter! Our FREE 3x weekly newsletter with freebies, deals, and savings hacks.
https://www.frugalfriendspodcast.com/friendletter
📣 Submit your bill of the week and get a shoutout from us
https://www.frugalfriendspodcast.com/bill-of-the-week/
💃🏼 Hang out with us on Instagram!
https://www.instagram.com/frugalfriendspodcast/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Budget Better bonus series Step one, Look to the Past.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast, where you'll learn to
save money, embrace simplicity, and liver your life. Here your
hosts Jen and Jill.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast. My name is Jen,
my name is Jill, and we wanted to give you
a little post holiday gift or mid holiday or mid
holiday gift wherever you're at, and we wanted to help
you budget better in twenty twenty five with a three
part bonus series we're calling Budget Better, and today's first
(00:50):
step is looking to the past.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
We're also going with a little bit of a Christmas theme,
Past present, future, so this is like what you can
expect from it.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Think about that.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Oh yeah, the ghost of Christmas past, present, in future.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
It all makes sense.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So this so today we're looking to the past. We're
just doing a quick twenty minute episode. Then we're going
to release part two, which will be Step through, which
is the present changes you can make now, and then
we're going to do Step three plan for the future.
So this is all happening kind of right in a row.
(01:28):
So if you love getting content from us, keep tuning in.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Yes, okay, so as the ghost of Christmas past, I'd
like to take you on a journey to your past,
but not to make you feel guilty or like a
bad person. We are I'm feeling like more like a
muppet like now, I'm feeling like like a kermit. I
(01:53):
want to help you. I want to encourage you and
help you feel neutral about your spending. So before we
get into the past, let's just set a foundation of neutrality.
We are looking and we're not judging. That's really what
(02:13):
we are doing. So let's start there, and then we
are going to do a walkthrough of the last ninety
days of our transactions. And yes, I understand it's the
end of December. You might want to go Hey, all
of my spending was really wonk you over the holidays.
(02:34):
I'm just going to go back to like August, September, October,
much more normal. And no, we really want you to
go through the last ninety days. And here's why. It's
because this is a more accurate depiction of your current
habits now and so we'll talk about that tomorrow. But
(02:54):
we're looking at the most recent past. So not no
eletons in your closet, because when we go back to
the past, past, the way back. That doesn't help us
get to the now or the future. It just makes
us feel sad.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, if you are a listener of the Frugal Friends podcast,
you know we've talked about a ninety day transaction inventory.
It's also one of the things that we go in
depth on in the book by what you Love without
Going Broke. And if you are a visual person, you
can get a walk through video of the ninety day
transaction inventory on the with the Resources page, so everyone
(03:33):
who gets the book just gets access to that. We
mention it throughout the book, so make sure you do
that so you can also have a visual element and
component added to this. This is one of the first
steps that we recommend before even considering creating a budget,
because we have to know what are our current spending habits,
how do we engage with money, where are impulse spending
(03:58):
transactions happen to even know the shifts that we need
to make and what we want to be doing with
our money, how we want to be allocating it. So
what we're going to do is collect the last ninety
days of transactions. This is going to include going back
to your credit card statements, your bank statements and getting
(04:19):
it all into one spreadsheet and and sorting it that way.
But we also want to include every single transaction, so
we're not excluding what we're paying for rent, what we're
paying for our mortgage, some of our more fixed expenses.
We want to be able to look at the whole
picture of all of our spending over the last ninety days,
(04:42):
So get that into a spreadsheet to be able to
then visualize this. The cool thing about a spreadsheet as well,
is we can then order it however we want. We
can order it by date, we can order it by location,
we can order it by spending amounts, so that there's
a variety of ways that we can kind of observe ourselves.
(05:02):
Another kind of piece that we want to add to this,
and you've heard us describe this before, but the questions
that we're going to then eventually ask ourselves about these transactions,
we want to avoid the why question. So once we
have this whole ninety days of transactions compiled, and whether
you're going to work in a spreadsheet digitally or you
(05:24):
print them out, you can do that too. If you
do print it out, I would just recommend having it
in order, in date order, and you can kind of
look at the various components that way as well. But
then what we want to be doing is having a
almost journal prompt in the column to the right of
(05:45):
each transaction, where we're able to ask ourselves questions like
what came just before this purchase, how did I feel
about this purchase? Did it achieve or get me what
I wanted this spending to get me? Of course we're
not going to remember that with every single transaction, but
(06:06):
as much as we can looking back to it, this
can also help us to understand some of the habits.
We can look at, you know, kind of what is
the queue that might have led to this spending, is
their location, proximity, time of day, people that I'm around,
and asking ourselves what led to this spending, not why
(06:29):
did I spend so much here? That's going to be
one of those ways that we can approach this ninety
day transaction inventory with neutrality is by not asking ourselves
inflammatory questions.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah, so if you don't want to do a spreadsheet,
if that feels a little overwhelming, you can also use
your budgeting app. And so this is going to work
best if you're using an app that you pay for
that has transactions automatically uploaded. I know with the fall
of Mint, there's not a lot of if any free
(07:01):
budgeting apps that can do that for you. But if
you do payper one like wine app or Monarch, which
is our favorite one right now, then this you can
do this really easily. You can sort it by category,
by place, by date, and it brings It's very versatile,
so you can look at these patterns more easily. But
(07:24):
otherwise a Google spreadsheet will do just fine.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And you can if that sounds interesting too, frugal friendspodcast
dot com slash Monarch, I think that they're running a sale.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yes, if you use Frugal friendspodcast dot com slash monarch,
you get thirty percent off of your first year, so
that's really great.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
So when we do this ninety day transaction inventory and
we've got it all gathered in our way that feels
best to us, again, whether that's paper or digitally or
through an app, and we're starting to see where our
spending is happening, noticing any patterns that might be coming
to the surface because of these non judgmental why questions
(08:07):
that we're asking ourselves. A couple of things that we
can expect to see is patterns, patterns of spending, patterns
of behavior. We will probably start to see maybe what
type of impulse spender we are. Whether we are primarily
making unplanned purchases out of habit, if we're making unplanned
(08:28):
purchases because of social influence, We're making unplanned purchases because
we like to shop as an activity or as the
result of stress or other ranges of emotion. Maybe it's
the thrill of the hunt. We are impulse spending on
any deals or price reduction stickers that we may see.
(08:48):
These are the types of things that are going to
be informative for us when we do get to that
point of making a spending plan, because the ways in
which we shift our behaviors need to be congruent with
the behaviors that need to be shifted. And so that's
something that the ninety day transaction inventory can bring to
the surface, is how am I even engaging in this?
(09:11):
In what way am I spending maybe unnecessarily or in
what ways do I want to be shifting? Do I
not even remember some of these purchases that I made,
and therefore I can say that wasn't actually that important?
So I might be able to eliminate those things, so
we can start to get an idea of the purchases
we felt really good about, the ones we forgot kind
of the easy knows, and start to kind of parse
(09:33):
this out of what do I want to keep for
the future, what feels good to me and congruent with
my needs and my values, and what of this can
I start to put on my easy no list. This
is going to be an easy thing to throw out
or at least for a time, say no to.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah, that no list is so important to make, and
we'll go into that a little bit more in the
next in tomorrow's episode, But we need to have a
no list and a yes list. We need to have
both lists, and they don't need to be long, especially
when you're first starting out, but we need to start
(10:12):
drawing some lines in the sand of These are the
things I will not buy anymore because I don't want
to buy them. And these are the things I will
buy without guilt because I love to buy them regardless
of what other people think or what other people want
me to spend on. These are my three to four
(10:34):
things on each list that I'm going to either buy
or not buy.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
And that's talking about some of this discretionary spending, But
as we mention, all of your more so fixed expenses
are also on this ninety day transaction inventory. So this
is a good time to even be able to question
some of those expenses. We're not saying you're going to
be moving in the next month or now you automatically
have to sell your car, but it is worth being
(11:01):
able to look at these larger expenses, the things that
take up the majority of our budget, and are there
questions and considerations that we can be asking ourselves when
it comes to housing. If you are thinking about moving soon,
certainly this is a good opportunity to look at what
am I currently spending on housing? What would my goal
be for the next place that I live? How much
(11:22):
of my income could I allocate here? It could also
be as simple as are there ways of reducing my
insurance costs on my house or rental costs at the
place that I'm living? Are there things that I can
do when it comes to transportation to be able to
reduce those costs? And planning on buying a car soon,
should I be considering what type of vehicle and what's
(11:45):
going to be kind of within range for the money
that I have and the goals that I have with
my money, And again as simple as are there ways
to reduce insurance costs and kind of my monthly overall
expenses if I'm not planning on making a big purchase,
massive money decision when it comes to these things, and
(12:05):
of course food is a massive area of spending for
a lot of us. What am I noticing specifically as
it relates to my food purchases, my food habits, How
might that inform the way that I want to engage
with this aspect of my lifestyle. So some of these
fixed expenses can still be questioned at this stage.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
It's important to look at the past because and especially
not to separate housing from transportation. They are intertwined. I know,
so much of the advice that we hear is you're
looking at your housing and you're saying, oh, can I
move maybe a little further away to save on housing,
and they don't take into consideration transportation, where if you're
(12:48):
breaking down the costs and looking on what you've spent
in the past, you can maybe see maybe it is
more I save more money by moving closer to my
job and having higher rent, because then we can go
down to one car and I save an entire car payment.
(13:08):
So when we look at the numbers from the past
instead of just blindly like following financial advice from people
who don't know us, then we can make informed, mathematically
accurate decisions for our situation. And it's the same with food.
If we're looking at our past food spending and we
(13:32):
are looking at these triggers that come around food, so
I'll just we use the cues from atomic habits, so
time of day, location, preceding event, or preceding location, other
people that you're with. So this is a real These
are really good ones to use for food because food
(13:56):
tends to be a habit purchase more than anything. So
looking at each of your food purchases and trying to
connect them back to one of these habit cues or
triggers can help you choose which one that you might
want to focus on when we go into our next
phase tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Well, this leads us to one of my favorite parts
of typical life.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
We say, yeah, even in a bonus round, we can't
get you can't get rid of it, the lightning round
poo pew.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Sorry, friends, we don't have a bill of a week
in our bonus.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I know those are special.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
We might have been letting you down just now, but
you did get the sound effects.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
All right, So what is something? So we recommend doing
a ninety day transaction inventory once a year, no matter
how long you've been budgeting, no matter where you're at.
There are some things that you can do less often
after you've been doing them for a while, but always
to do a ninety day transaction inventory at least once
(15:02):
a year. When you're starting out, you may do it
three or four times a year. It's really beneficial to
take that inventory more frequently when you are first learning
this stuff. So in our last ninety day transaction inventory,
we're going to share with you what's something that you noticed,
(15:23):
and I will go first. So for me, I don't
budget monthly anymore, and so I keep an eye. I
do use Monarch. It's not just something that I like
promote and I love the option to have a widget
on my phone with my most recent transactions there. So
(15:43):
I keep tabs on the transactions. I make sure the
transactions are all ones that I have made or Travis
has made. That's a big, a big reason to be
continuously checking in with your spending to make sure nobody
has taken your credit card information buying things without your knowledge.
(16:04):
But so, yeah, I do that, And I look at
the cash flow when we're doing our transaction inventory, and
something that surprised me was the amount of excess we
had each month when it felt like we were just
(16:26):
like I knew we were breaking even, but to see
month over month the amount of cash flow extra cash
flow that we had was encouraging and.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Oh nice, like you were living kind of lower me
without really putting that much intention into it. Just it's
natural life.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And I knew we were doing it. I knew. It's
one of those things like I knew we were doing it,
but you still, like, without checking in, you can't be sure.
And so that's why we also tell people when you
do something like this, the anticipation is always worse than
the actual end result. You always think it's going to
(17:08):
be worse than it actually is.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
I think, yeah, in part because even if there's big
shifts that need to be changed, just pulling the veil
back and looking can help to remove some of that
that shame, that fear. Being able to look at something
and know the realities of it can automatically dissipate some
(17:31):
of those the mystery of it.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, but I was happy with what all of our
spending was. That's cool the year.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Do you have a preferred way of arranging the transaction inventory?
I like to do it by date, but do you
have a preference.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I also like to do it by date in groups
of months. Monarch makes it very easy to do that,
to see it month by month, or to see all
the transactions together. But there were sometimes where I forgot
or maybe it was like mismarked. It was at the
very end of the month, so it was put into
the next month when it should have been in the
(18:09):
last month. It was then easy to click on that
transaction and see all those transactions back to back.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
So that is and that's something easy you can do
in the Google sheet too, when you just sort buy
out like alphabetical and you can see all of the
all of one transaction type in a row. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah. For me, I noticed that we spend the majority
of our money on the weekends. We don't really leave
the house very often during the week. We work from home.
I've gotten really good at eating at home and meal
planning and cooking throughout the week. But then I think
because of that, just because we're human and we need
(18:52):
to get out and we need some sort of difference
in stimulation and spontaneity, that will then be when we
kind of make all of our purchases, and some of
them are necessary, like we're running our errands, it's when
we're getting our groceries. But it kind of then spikes
on the weekends and then dips during the week, And
so in some ways it helped it inform are there
(19:12):
ways that I can rearrange what I do during the
on the weekends, Like, is some of this just to
get me activity? Is some of this shopping as an activity?
What of this is actually getting me like the things
that I need and want? Where can I make shifts?
So it has led to just a greater awareness of
(19:33):
free activities both on the weekend and throughout the week,
knowing I do need to get out, but I don't
necessarily want that to lead to increased spending, and how
can I kind of spread this out a little more
so it doesn't feel like whiplash for me throughout the week. So, yeah,
interesting observations.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Yeah, Well, thank you so much for joining us in
step one of the budget Better Bonus series. Tomorrow we
will be back with step two, which is what do
we do with changes now as a result of what
we've learned from our past transactions, See you then. Frugal
(20:12):
Friends is produced by Eric Sirianni
Budget Better bonus series Step one, Look to the Past.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast, where you'll learn to
save money, embrace simplicity, and liver your life. Here your
hosts Jen and Jill.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast. My name is Jen,
my name is Jill, and we wanted to give you
a little post holiday gift or mid holiday or mid
holiday gift wherever you're at, and we wanted to help
you budget better in twenty twenty five with a three
part bonus series we're calling Budget Better, and today's first
(00:50):
step is looking to the past.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
We're also going with a little bit of a Christmas theme,
Past present, future, so this is like what you can
expect from it.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Think about that.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Oh yeah, the ghost of Christmas past, present, in future.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
It all makes sense.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So this so today we're looking to the past. We're
just doing a quick twenty minute episode. Then we're going
to release part two, which will be Step through, which
is the present changes you can make now, and then
we're going to do Step three plan for the future.
So this is all happening kind of right in a row.
(01:28):
So if you love getting content from us, keep tuning in.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Yes, okay, so as the ghost of Christmas past, I'd
like to take you on a journey to your past,
but not to make you feel guilty or like a
bad person. We are I'm feeling like more like a
muppet like now, I'm feeling like like a kermit. I
(01:53):
want to help you. I want to encourage you and
help you feel neutral about your spending. So before we
get into the past, let's just set a foundation of neutrality.
We are looking and we're not judging. That's really what
(02:13):
we are doing. So let's start there, and then we
are going to do a walkthrough of the last ninety
days of our transactions. And yes, I understand it's the
end of December. You might want to go Hey, all
of my spending was really wonk you over the holidays.
(02:34):
I'm just going to go back to like August, September, October,
much more normal. And no, we really want you to
go through the last ninety days. And here's why. It's
because this is a more accurate depiction of your current
habits now and so we'll talk about that tomorrow. But
(02:54):
we're looking at the most recent past. So not no
eletons in your closet, because when we go back to
the past, past, the way back. That doesn't help us
get to the now or the future. It just makes
us feel sad.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, if you are a listener of the Frugal Friends podcast,
you know we've talked about a ninety day transaction inventory.
It's also one of the things that we go in
depth on in the book by what you Love without
Going Broke. And if you are a visual person, you
can get a walk through video of the ninety day
transaction inventory on the with the Resources page, so everyone
(03:33):
who gets the book just gets access to that. We
mention it throughout the book, so make sure you do
that so you can also have a visual element and
component added to this. This is one of the first
steps that we recommend before even considering creating a budget,
because we have to know what are our current spending habits,
how do we engage with money, where are impulse spending
(03:58):
transactions happen to even know the shifts that we need
to make and what we want to be doing with
our money, how we want to be allocating it. So
what we're going to do is collect the last ninety
days of transactions. This is going to include going back
to your credit card statements, your bank statements and getting
(04:19):
it all into one spreadsheet and and sorting it that way.
But we also want to include every single transaction, so
we're not excluding what we're paying for rent, what we're
paying for our mortgage, some of our more fixed expenses.
We want to be able to look at the whole
picture of all of our spending over the last ninety days,
(04:42):
So get that into a spreadsheet to be able to
then visualize this. The cool thing about a spreadsheet as well,
is we can then order it however we want. We
can order it by date, we can order it by location,
we can order it by spending amounts, so that there's
a variety of ways that we can kind of observe ourselves.
(05:02):
Another kind of piece that we want to add to this,
and you've heard us describe this before, but the questions
that we're going to then eventually ask ourselves about these transactions,
we want to avoid the why question. So once we
have this whole ninety days of transactions compiled, and whether
you're going to work in a spreadsheet digitally or you
(05:24):
print them out, you can do that too. If you
do print it out, I would just recommend having it
in order, in date order, and you can kind of
look at the various components that way as well. But
then what we want to be doing is having a
almost journal prompt in the column to the right of
(05:45):
each transaction, where we're able to ask ourselves questions like
what came just before this purchase, how did I feel
about this purchase? Did it achieve or get me what
I wanted this spending to get me? Of course we're
not going to remember that with every single transaction, but
(06:06):
as much as we can looking back to it, this
can also help us to understand some of the habits.
We can look at, you know, kind of what is
the queue that might have led to this spending, is
their location, proximity, time of day, people that I'm around,
and asking ourselves what led to this spending, not why
(06:29):
did I spend so much here? That's going to be
one of those ways that we can approach this ninety
day transaction inventory with neutrality is by not asking ourselves
inflammatory questions.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah, so if you don't want to do a spreadsheet,
if that feels a little overwhelming, you can also use
your budgeting app. And so this is going to work
best if you're using an app that you pay for
that has transactions automatically uploaded. I know with the fall
of Mint, there's not a lot of if any free
(07:01):
budgeting apps that can do that for you. But if
you do payper one like wine app or Monarch, which
is our favorite one right now, then this you can
do this really easily. You can sort it by category,
by place, by date, and it brings It's very versatile,
so you can look at these patterns more easily. But
(07:24):
otherwise a Google spreadsheet will do just fine.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And you can if that sounds interesting too, frugal friendspodcast
dot com slash Monarch, I think that they're running a sale.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yes, if you use Frugal friendspodcast dot com slash monarch,
you get thirty percent off of your first year, so
that's really great.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
So when we do this ninety day transaction inventory and
we've got it all gathered in our way that feels
best to us, again, whether that's paper or digitally or
through an app, and we're starting to see where our
spending is happening, noticing any patterns that might be coming
to the surface because of these non judgmental why questions
(08:07):
that we're asking ourselves. A couple of things that we
can expect to see is patterns, patterns of spending, patterns
of behavior. We will probably start to see maybe what
type of impulse spender we are. Whether we are primarily
making unplanned purchases out of habit, if we're making unplanned
(08:28):
purchases because of social influence, We're making unplanned purchases because
we like to shop as an activity or as the
result of stress or other ranges of emotion. Maybe it's
the thrill of the hunt. We are impulse spending on
any deals or price reduction stickers that we may see.
(08:48):
These are the types of things that are going to
be informative for us when we do get to that
point of making a spending plan, because the ways in
which we shift our behaviors need to be congruent with
the behaviors that need to be shifted. And so that's
something that the ninety day transaction inventory can bring to
the surface, is how am I even engaging in this?
(09:11):
In what way am I spending maybe unnecessarily or in
what ways do I want to be shifting? Do I
not even remember some of these purchases that I made,
and therefore I can say that wasn't actually that important?
So I might be able to eliminate those things, so
we can start to get an idea of the purchases
we felt really good about, the ones we forgot kind
of the easy knows, and start to kind of parse
(09:33):
this out of what do I want to keep for
the future, what feels good to me and congruent with
my needs and my values, and what of this can
I start to put on my easy no list. This
is going to be an easy thing to throw out
or at least for a time, say no to.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah, that no list is so important to make, and
we'll go into that a little bit more in the
next in tomorrow's episode, But we need to have a
no list and a yes list. We need to have
both lists, and they don't need to be long, especially
when you're first starting out, but we need to start
(10:12):
drawing some lines in the sand of These are the
things I will not buy anymore because I don't want
to buy them. And these are the things I will
buy without guilt because I love to buy them regardless
of what other people think or what other people want
me to spend on. These are my three to four
(10:34):
things on each list that I'm going to either buy
or not buy.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
And that's talking about some of this discretionary spending, But
as we mention, all of your more so fixed expenses
are also on this ninety day transaction inventory. So this
is a good time to even be able to question
some of those expenses. We're not saying you're going to
be moving in the next month or now you automatically
have to sell your car, but it is worth being
(11:01):
able to look at these larger expenses, the things that
take up the majority of our budget, and are there
questions and considerations that we can be asking ourselves when
it comes to housing. If you are thinking about moving soon,
certainly this is a good opportunity to look at what
am I currently spending on housing? What would my goal
be for the next place that I live? How much
(11:22):
of my income could I allocate here? It could also
be as simple as are there ways of reducing my
insurance costs on my house or rental costs at the
place that I'm living? Are there things that I can
do when it comes to transportation to be able to
reduce those costs? And planning on buying a car soon,
should I be considering what type of vehicle and what's
(11:45):
going to be kind of within range for the money
that I have and the goals that I have with
my money, And again as simple as are there ways
to reduce insurance costs and kind of my monthly overall
expenses if I'm not planning on making a big purchase,
massive money decision when it comes to these things, and
(12:05):
of course food is a massive area of spending for
a lot of us. What am I noticing specifically as
it relates to my food purchases, my food habits, How
might that inform the way that I want to engage
with this aspect of my lifestyle. So some of these
fixed expenses can still be questioned at this stage.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
It's important to look at the past because and especially
not to separate housing from transportation. They are intertwined. I know,
so much of the advice that we hear is you're
looking at your housing and you're saying, oh, can I
move maybe a little further away to save on housing,
and they don't take into consideration transportation, where if you're
(12:48):
breaking down the costs and looking on what you've spent
in the past, you can maybe see maybe it is
more I save more money by moving closer to my
job and having higher rent, because then we can go
down to one car and I save an entire car payment.
(13:08):
So when we look at the numbers from the past
instead of just blindly like following financial advice from people
who don't know us, then we can make informed, mathematically
accurate decisions for our situation. And it's the same with food.
If we're looking at our past food spending and we
(13:32):
are looking at these triggers that come around food, so
I'll just we use the cues from atomic habits, so
time of day, location, preceding event, or preceding location, other
people that you're with. So this is a real These
are really good ones to use for food because food
(13:56):
tends to be a habit purchase more than anything. So
looking at each of your food purchases and trying to
connect them back to one of these habit cues or
triggers can help you choose which one that you might
want to focus on when we go into our next
phase tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Well, this leads us to one of my favorite parts
of typical life.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
We say, yeah, even in a bonus round, we can't
get you can't get rid of it, the lightning round
poo pew.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Sorry, friends, we don't have a bill of a week
in our bonus.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I know those are special.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
We might have been letting you down just now, but
you did get the sound effects.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
All right, So what is something? So we recommend doing
a ninety day transaction inventory once a year, no matter
how long you've been budgeting, no matter where you're at.
There are some things that you can do less often
after you've been doing them for a while, but always
to do a ninety day transaction inventory at least once
(15:02):
a year. When you're starting out, you may do it
three or four times a year. It's really beneficial to
take that inventory more frequently when you are first learning
this stuff. So in our last ninety day transaction inventory,
we're going to share with you what's something that you noticed,
(15:23):
and I will go first. So for me, I don't
budget monthly anymore, and so I keep an eye. I
do use Monarch. It's not just something that I like
promote and I love the option to have a widget
on my phone with my most recent transactions there. So
(15:43):
I keep tabs on the transactions. I make sure the
transactions are all ones that I have made or Travis
has made. That's a big, a big reason to be
continuously checking in with your spending to make sure nobody
has taken your credit card information buying things without your knowledge.
(16:04):
But so, yeah, I do that, And I look at
the cash flow when we're doing our transaction inventory, and
something that surprised me was the amount of excess we
had each month when it felt like we were just
(16:26):
like I knew we were breaking even, but to see
month over month the amount of cash flow extra cash
flow that we had was encouraging and.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Oh nice, like you were living kind of lower me
without really putting that much intention into it. Just it's
natural life.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And I knew we were doing it. I knew. It's
one of those things like I knew we were doing it,
but you still, like, without checking in, you can't be sure.
And so that's why we also tell people when you
do something like this, the anticipation is always worse than
the actual end result. You always think it's going to
(17:08):
be worse than it actually is.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
I think, yeah, in part because even if there's big
shifts that need to be changed, just pulling the veil
back and looking can help to remove some of that
that shame, that fear. Being able to look at something
and know the realities of it can automatically dissipate some
(17:31):
of those the mystery of it.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, but I was happy with what all of our
spending was. That's cool the year.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Do you have a preferred way of arranging the transaction inventory?
I like to do it by date, but do you
have a preference.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I also like to do it by date in groups
of months. Monarch makes it very easy to do that,
to see it month by month, or to see all
the transactions together. But there were sometimes where I forgot
or maybe it was like mismarked. It was at the
very end of the month, so it was put into
the next month when it should have been in the
(18:09):
last month. It was then easy to click on that
transaction and see all those transactions back to back.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
So that is and that's something easy you can do
in the Google sheet too, when you just sort buy
out like alphabetical and you can see all of the
all of one transaction type in a row. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah. For me, I noticed that we spend the majority
of our money on the weekends. We don't really leave
the house very often during the week. We work from home.
I've gotten really good at eating at home and meal
planning and cooking throughout the week. But then I think
because of that, just because we're human and we need
(18:52):
to get out and we need some sort of difference
in stimulation and spontaneity, that will then be when we
kind of make all of our purchases, and some of
them are necessary, like we're running our errands, it's when
we're getting our groceries. But it kind of then spikes
on the weekends and then dips during the week, And
so in some ways it helped it inform are there
(19:12):
ways that I can rearrange what I do during the
on the weekends, Like, is some of this just to
get me activity? Is some of this shopping as an activity?
What of this is actually getting me like the things
that I need and want? Where can I make shifts?
So it has led to just a greater awareness of
(19:33):
free activities both on the weekend and throughout the week,
knowing I do need to get out, but I don't
necessarily want that to lead to increased spending, and how
can I kind of spread this out a little more
so it doesn't feel like whiplash for me throughout the week. So, yeah,
interesting observations.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Yeah, Well, thank you so much for joining us in
step one of the budget Better Bonus series. Tomorrow we
will be back with step two, which is what do
we do with changes now as a result of what
we've learned from our past transactions, See you then. Frugal
(20:12):
Friends is produced by Eric Sirianni
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!