How to Build Your April 2025 Budget (Step-by-Step With Us!)

 It is time. No say so. I know April. Guys, it is coming in fast. We want to make April’s 2025 budget with you. It’s time. Maybe this is the first month that you are going to finally really do this or maybe even going strong all year.

We don’t know either way. We’re gonna help you. It’s gonna be amazing. I think these episodes really help because it helps jog people’s memory as to what they need to add.

 And it’s not even just jog your memory about what you forgot just to do it. This is the time of month. This is your reminder. Yes. This is your in the month reminder.

It’s time. Okay. You know that we’re all about making this simple, but there is one step you have to do before you get to the very easy peasy lemon squeezy.

 Situation of your budget, which is to. Close out the month prior. So here we’re talking about March, right? Yeah. So we, you need to be able to close out the current month’s budget and really look at it and go, okay, is this what happened?

Is this what didn’t happen? What do I need to change? What do I need to tweak to be able to check all the boxes and make sure that number at the top, the total remaining is actually zero in order to move on to the next month. You would update the numbers. Maybe your phone bill went up to two 11, like they always do. You need to update that number. You don’t have to add a, another column to say real versus actual or whatever. You just put in the actual number. And update it. Make sure everything’s good. This is also when you would check like Vanessa’s saying, make sure what’s in my bills, what’s in I spending my savings buckets, whatever I might have matches and makes sense.

To what my budget is, what it’s supposed to say. And you’re debt tracker as well. So you really wanna make sure that at the end of the month you go, okay, now that I’ve paid all my bills for this month, what’s my new current balance? We don’t ever touch the beginning balance ’cause we want to see the numbers go down.

Yeah. So we only update the current balance here. And then if your minimum payment changed or your interest rate changed, if you talk to them or whatever that is, update all that. And Lauren said on the podcast, the cool thing about doing this, like if I do this right here, is it will slowly show me how much debt I’ve paid off, which is really exciting.

It’s exciting to, it’s just an, we’re all like numbers, wire, we like to see rewards. So the reward is, as you update this monthly, you’ll see this number change. How much you paid off. And even over here, your assets are gonna continue to go up. You’re gonna say, oh, my net worth is up.

So you’re gonna be excited. It’s gonna be fun. It’s happy, it’s so fun when we get colors. But I was very on purpose, but no, I, I love being able to show clients, Hey, in two months you’ve paid off 4,000. They’re like, I did. And yes. Are you sure? Yes.

We, it’s, and numbers don’t lie. That’s what we love about it. Yeah, that’s true. Okay, so once you’ve closed out the current month’s budget, you’re going to move on to the next month, which in this case is April. And the first thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna list your monthly income. What is all the money that you have coming in this month?

These two people, this couple, they get paid once a month, so that’s why they income is only listed one time. Yeah. If they got two paychecks in that month, we’re gonna list both paychecks separately and put the dates that they come in. So that way you can check the box and go, okay, this paycheck came in and this paycheck came in.

You wanna really be clear so you know exactly when it’s coming in. Yeah. And then you can say, yes it did. Yeah. And the cool thing about this, like we said, is now you can see how much money you make, how much money you have to work with this month. So you need to put this in. We understand, especially this one is probably the one that might change the most.

So we want you to put in. For all of our clients, we have a baseline number. We’re gonna put 32, 35, 20, but you might, he might bring in 37 20. Because he might get an extra shift or he might get whatever, who knows. But put your baseline number in budget with that, and then if you get paid more, we can update that and it’ll, and, put it, give it a job on purpose.

Yeah. The flip side of that is don’t ever overestimate your income. We would rather you underestimate your income and overestimate your expenses because we want you to know that your budget is good and you can budget everything on the least amount of money that you’re gonna bring in this month. My client learned this the hard way.

She wanted to tell me that her husband always brought in a thousand dollars a week. That wasn’t true. It ended up being like 900 or nine 50, and we needed that difference because she needed every single dollar. In her budget to do something. So we had to change it and that really allowed the relief that she needed to know that Okay, I, we lowered it.

And everything is still covered. Yeah. So just make sure you put all of your income, maybe you’re getting a tax return this month, a bonus dividends like. Whatever you’re having a garage shell, whatever it is. Let’s put this in there so we can make the full plan. Yep, absolutely. Okay, so you have your income, it totals it at the bottom if you’re watching online, and then it puts it in the very top box.

There’s three big boxes at the top. It says total income, total budget, and total remaining. So it tells you exactly. Voila. This is the amazing number, the best number of your budget. It’s positive. This is what you got. Okay, so then the next thing you wanna do is you wanna list your monthly minimum debt payments.

And we’re not saying to add a hundred dollars here, a hundred dollars there, whatever you’re extra paying on the No. We wanna know what do you owe, what is the minimum amount of money that you owe on your debts every single month? Yeah. And this is a separate column and just, we are going a little bit quickly through this, so take your time after you listen to the income, pause.

List your income and then come back. And now we’re talking about debts. Now you can do your debts, right? We may be talking fast, but you can pause us and build your budget with us as you go. And we’re also, if you’re watching on YouTube, you can see our budget, you can see us do it with you.

And so yeah, the debts are only the minimums. We’ve said this before. We’ll say it again. The more things, more times we repeat it, the easier it is for you to understand. The more it just becomes part of the way your brain works. We are putting these first, because one, we wanna see them separately.

Yes. It might be a little bit of a gut punch. That’s okay. But it needs to be that way you can get motivated to, to get rid of it. But this column, this debt column can completely go away. You don’t have to have debt. You could work hard, pay this off and never have to fill this column out again.

It can be filled with funds, savings, or whatever else you wanna do. So that’s why it’s here. It’s stuff that can go away that we’re gonna work on purpose to, to get rid of. Yeah. And why are we doing only the minimum payments? And you’re like, why? I wanna pay an extra 50 bucks here and a hundred bucks there.

We need to know if we clump all that money together, plus the extra that you have at the end of the year after making your whole budget. If you have $3,000 at the end of your budget to be able to do something with, we wanna see that. We don’t wanna see, maybe you have 2000, but there’s a couple extra a hundred here and there.

We don’t wanna do that. We wanna see You can do more with the bulk money than you can if it’s all spread out here and there. Okay, so the next column is your bills, right? Debt. Yes. Technically debts are bills, but again, they can be, they can go away. You’re gonna have bills most, I don’t, if you find a way to not have bills, please email us.

Please let us know. Get us in on that. But the next thing is the bills and bills are anything with a due date. And so we like to list these. We like to have if we can. Like you can brain dump them and then put ’em in your budget, like in order of due date. ’cause that kind of just helps you stay streamlined with it.

But we wanna put, your mortgage, your utilities, your phone, your subscriptions, Netflix, daycare, bills, whatever it is, gym memberships, they’re all gonna go in here. Yeah. So anything like Shana said that has a due date, usually your bill for these, it’s reoccurring.

You put all of these in the bills section and we have a really nice place for you to write the name, the budgeted amount, and then the due date, so that way you can track that throughout the month. Yeah you can just watch your bills account, pay them. You don’t have to track it. Yeah. Not, you don’t have to track anything because again, you’re not tracking expenses because you’re, it’s in its own account.

That’s the wonderful thing. A lot of people love the checkbox factor that we have going on here. I’m one of those people. Yes. So being able to check those off at the end of the month to make sure that everything is done, it is really appealing. Yep. So at this point we have a budget where we have for the example budget that we are building, their income is $5,800.

Between their debt and their bills, they have spent $3,700. So now they have 2100 left as they go into planning their spending and planning their savings. And those are the next two that we’re gonna look at our spending and then our savings. Yep. So when you are thinking about your spending, remember this is where you live in your budget.

So your spending is things like gas and groceries, haircuts, pocket money, restaurants, all of that. So we wanna be able to list all of those out. And again, we talk about having categories ’cause we don’t need every, we don’t need to say I’m gonna go to Starbucks, I’m gonna spend this amount of money.

I’m gonna go to Target. And no. If that is all going in your personal pocket money, then lump it all in your personal pocket money. Because remember, it has its own separate account. Once you put the money in there, have a good time. And so again we want you to think about. How much money you’re gonna have based on, you’re gonna be able to do it based on the math that the budget is showing you.

So with them, they decided $1,400 for groceries, pocket money is 400. They have a birthday that they have to budget for, right? So now after everything’s said and done, they have $220 left. And that’s when we go over to spend or savings and say, okay, what do I need to save for? What are the top priorities?

If I had a lot more money left over, I could put a lot more things in there. But either way, I’m gonna go ahead and plan my savings. Yeah. So what are your savings? Your savings is the last section of your budget, and these are all for upcoming future expenses, like annual bills.

Those are, that’s the adulting part of this. Your kids’ sports, Christmas travel, vacations, vehicle maintenance, home repairs, all of that stuff that you may have coming up that you know that you have to pay for. We’re gonna put it in your savings that we’re gonna budget for. So we’re gonna, what we’re gonna do is plan for the annual amounts.

And then you’re gonna put that base, give or take, divided by 12, right? So if you know that. Your kids cost you $5,000 a year. Love that for you. If they cost you that, wait, is this with travel sports or without, obviously without, but let’s say between camps, new clothes, whatever it is that you budget for them for, right?

They cost you 5,000, then you need to, then you would be putting 600 into their kids’ savings bucket that month, right? So that’s the idea. That’s the part that goes in your budget is the monthly amount that you’re shooting over. To be able to save for it. If you’re tracking on YouTube, we are showing our savings bucket tracker.

Now, a lot of people ask us, they email us and go, Hey, does the savings bucket tracker automatically coincide and put that amount into your budget? And we’re like, no. And it shouldn’t because we want you to do the work to figure out, yes, this is how much my kids cost. This is how much my pets cost.

This is how many, so much we’re gonna spend on travel this year. Keyword want. Because you may fill this out and realize, Hey, I actually can’t afford all this. I need to tone it down. So you need to make your budget match, that you need to put in your budget what you can afford, and someday the ultimate goal is to be able to afford everything that you want to do in a year.

Yeah. And I love that. So you and I have clients right now that have to prioritize which savings buckets they are. We’ll tell you some examples and then you guys can decide. Which ones are a priority my pet doesn’t need the fanciest new bed they may not need it, but they have to get their annual visit done. The ideas would be like pets, kids, gifts, home repairs, or home maintenance, clothing, annual bills, travel.

Medical is a big one. And then vehicle maintenance and repairs as well. Yep. Okay, so now we’ve created a budget. We started with the income. We made sure we put all the money we’re gonna make this month in there, and then we started taking it away after that we said.

We gotta pay our debt payments, and then we’re gonna pay our bills, then we’re gonna list our spending. And then we’re gonna list our saving. Yeah. And then the only thing that can sometimes happen is that we have monthly spending.

 So here the next thing that you’re gonna do after you get all of these basically filled out is you’re going to fill out the things that are gonna be different for this month. Like in this case, they had a birthday that they put in for this month.

At the beginning, on, on the top of your spending, you’re gonna have all your consistent stuff. So your restaurants, your groceries, your pocket money, all of that. And then you’re gonna list out, like Shayna said, anything that’s month specific. So for example, for. April, we’ve got Easter. Maybe you have vacations, birthdays, anniversaries.

Yeah. Or like us travel sports. Yep. That’s definitely a thing. And I wanted to just throw it out there that my husband said, April is the time when you buy four wheelers and dogs. And I just, what he meant by that, you guys is when we lived in Alaska, but it’s not just Alaska, it’s a lot of places when you have cabin people have cabin fever.

So you gotta be careful because if you have cabin fever, you might wanna make some really interesting purchases and because you’re just feeling a certain kind of way. It finally gets warm and you can go outside. But even if your wife is pregnant and you think this is a great time to get a puppy, like sometimes that might happen to you.

No, just me. Just you. Maybe I’m sure it’s happened to many people, but Yeah. But truly it is spring, so there’s maybe some stuff for yard maintenance, your home, like stuff that you need to change over. I have this friend from gymnastics, he comes in every time. He’s I just got done working in the yard for two weeks.

He’s been saying that I’m like. Am I missing out? What is my year like? I know I’m not doing that. So what am I doing wrong? But also don’t forget about summer people underestimate that it’s coming and April is here and then that means all you have is May left.

So if there’s some big expense that’s going on in the summer, let’s start planning ahead of time. And if you couldn’t put it in your budget in March, maybe you have. A tax return coming in April. So that way you can, it’ll help you budget for those vacations or summer camps or whatever you have coming up.

Yeah. And that’s just really important. If you get that tax return, you do need to budget it. It needs to come in here and you need to plan for it. Doesn’t mean you can’t do something fun with it, just make sure it’s part of the plan. And then, again, what the next part that we wanna do is the paycheck plan.

What we’ve done is we’ve said in a month, this is what’s happening, right? With my budget. Now we’re not planning everything via paycheck, right? But we are saying on payday, this is what’s happening. So if you what you do is you say, in April I budgeted for, $1,400 of groceries. I’m going to get, have that transfer happen into my grocery account.

Twice. So I get $700. Twice throughout the month. So I don’t I’m not trying to budget $1,400 for 31 days. That’s not fun. Nobody wants to do that. That’s hard. 30, in April, but either way. So every two weeks I get 700 bucks. And I can like, understand that and work with that.

So if you’re following us and tracking on YouTube, we have pulled up our paycheck plan. It is a signature thing that we have done. We haven’t really seen it anywhere else. And so what it does is it tells you, like Shayna said, what you have digital, what you have cash, and what is a onetime transfer.

And so the onetime things are the budget this month, specific things that we just talked about. You have a birthday, you have Easter coming up. You don’t necessarily need to take money out or transfer that money twice during that month. You just need to do it when that time occurs, right?

Whatever time, you’re just gonna transfer the bulk money for that over into your spending. And you’re gonna spend the money and it, this whole plan lays it out for you. Okay. So it tells you exactly what is one time, what is cash, what is digital, and where to put it. So you just follow this and you don’t really like Vanessa, we have a lot of clients that don’t even really look at their budget.

They just do this. They make sure that this happens. So anything that’s digital obviously can happen automatically. You shouldn’t have to do anything. You’re gonna set that up to happen automatically. The one-time things are things that you’re gonna have to go do. So you’ll go pull out the money for the kids or you’ll go pull out the birthday money.

Yeah. And again, those are really the only manual things that you have to do. Otherwise it just makes it super easy. And if your grocery budget, your gas budget, your restaurant, all that’s pretty consistent that’s happening for you. But pulling up the paycheck plan to see anything else that you added to that month just allows you to check boxes and know that I’ve completed it and I can move on.

Yeah. And so the last thing you really wanna think about after you’ve done your budget you closed out March, you’ve done your budget for April, is what are the goals that I have and what do I want, what do I want to accomplish with my money? This particular month, right? So maybe I’m gonna get my taxes and I’m gonna add that in there ’cause I forgot, and Shane and Vanessa just told me.

So maybe you’re gonna have a $2,000 tax return, so maybe you wanna pay, you’re gonna put in there, okay, this is the month I finally got that tax return. It’s, I can make a big dent. I’m gonna pay $2,000 on my chase. Bam.

And I’m gonna do that. And that’s what we were saying. You might have different goals this particular month, and we want you to go ahead and think of what is my money? What’s the big thing I’m gonna do this month? So we have some of our clients are transitioning to a new job. So I have one lady who just had a new baby.

She is we had saved up for the past four or five months into her maternity fund, and now she’s using that money to fund while she’s home. But while she’s home, she’s also looking for a different job. She’s gonna be transitioning into a different position. And so that is what she’s looking for.

She’s trying to figure out, okay, how much money do I need for this new job? And so on and so forth. And so it might be something monetary like that or something monetary, like paying off debt with your tax return, but it might be. Something habitual or something just generally in that’s with your money that you wanna do.

For example, I have a client that’s setting up her savings buckets for her business that we finally are getting to that. That’s the big central thing that she’s gonna work on this month. We just got off a call and what he’s gonna do is try to get one paycheck ahead, like that’s his big focus for this month. So it’s just, what am I doing? Where is my focus? And we just think it’s really good to think about that while you’re setting up the budget. And remember, this is not a cookie cutter system. What somebody else is doing is not what you need to be doing. Shana said, everyone has different goals.

Everyone has something different that they’re trying to accomplish at different seasons of life and different times during the year. So a lot of people come to us wanna do the savings buckets. They can’t, but hey, like Shana said, her business client at this point in her coaching is finally able to set up her business.

Savings buckets. So she’s doing that. Maybe you are at a point where you’ve paid down a bunch of debt. Maybe you got your taxes done early, you’re super on it. In March was that time for you. So now April, you’re making April’s budget for the first time without three or four debts. That’s huge.

So maybe now you can start setting up your savings buckets. Or maybe you can fund a vacation in cash. Yes. We love that for you. We love that for us. We love that for everybody. So the idea here is to set up your April budget. We’ve got, you’ve got this, we told you’re gonna close out March. You’re gonna, then you’re gonna put in your April budget income, then debt minimums, then your bills, then spending, then savings.

Then you’re gonna look at anything specific for April. And then any big goals that you have.

 And you know what’s gonna make this easier for them, Vanessa? Our simplified budget system. Weird. How did you know I was gonna say that? So we have an amazing system for you. If you’re watching on YouTube, you are seeing it live in action.

It’s really pretty easy to use easy to understand. So if you want more information about it, go to budget besties.com/budget to check it out.