Why Moving Messes Up Your Budget (And How to Fix It Before It Wrecks Your Finances)

 And I love how it’s just a short season. Some people would’ve seen that situation go, Nope, I don’t wanna do that, and that’s fine, that’s not wrong. And then she saw an opportunity and go, okay, we are gonna do this, but we are willing to sacrifice.

Some people don’t wanna sacrifice and they try to move in the house, buy the furniture, and get all the stuff in. That puts them in a really icky situation. I did that. We bought a house, even though it was a really great deal, we still barely could afford it, but then we also wanted to furnish it.

And so we went to the store and that’s how we, I think that was our first debt as a married couple, was racking up furniture loans for everything. And not great. Don’t recommend it, but I feel like that’s everybody’s first. Debt kind of deal when you’re married anyway. ’cause we gotta now we gotta move in together and we wanna be adulting, yeah.

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 Today? We’re bringing your real life stories and lessons from our private coaching sessions. If our clients are dealing with it, chances are you are too. So we’re breaking it down to help you avoid the same mistakes, feel less alone, and walk away with some quick wins for your budget.

 Alright. So our first lesson today is that moving is messy. Okay. So I had a session with a client and I think she wanted everything to be tidy ’cause she’s been doing this for a while and. But her budget wasn’t looking great.

Yeah. Because there’s so many different things that happen when you move. It’s not only like how you get out of the one house and whatever you might have to do to pay for that, it’s all of the expenses that might go into getting to the other house and then getting in the other house. You know what I mean?

So there’s so many different things and it’s just gonna be messy. It’s not like you can try as much as you want to plan for it, and that’s important and you should be setting aside money, but just understand that it’s just, it’s a messy season. And don’t be too hard on yourself. Yeah. So when you said she does this a lot, was it moving?

No, she’s just, she’s been budgeting a lot, or budgeting, and it’s gotten, she’s gotten it down to a science. I wasn’t sure if it was the budgeting she had on set on or it was moving. ’cause I know, you’ve moved a lot. And so you had it down to a science with all your strategy but still, but really just the real science of it, Vanessa is like saving so much money that you, that that you’re ready for whatever they, yeah, it might happen, but yeah. Because people think that moving is okay, I have my $10,000 down payment or whatever, and they’re like, done.

No. And they think that from this point on, it should be easy. But you know what we’ve learned, what we’ve told our clients is that you need to almost save double, like whatever you’ve saved for a down payment, you need to also save that for moving expenses because there’s just a lot involved with it.

Yeah. To get out, like I said, to get out of the house between maybe you have to clean the carpets or who knows, or you obviously have to get stuff done, but then when you wanna get to the new house, you might have extra deposits for electric even if you’re renting or if you’re buying, then you’re gonna have all kinds of stuff that goes into that.

So just. The point here isn’t necessarily, maybe that’s a good episode to do, is like how to plan for a move and pay for it, a budget for it, but just give yourself grace. But I did wanna add this, and I know you’re gonna agree. She was looking forward, so she’s being very smart and you should too.

She’s giving herself a second to get to where she’s going before she buys the house. Buys the house. Oh, that’s good. And so you can get the lay of the land and all that, but she was thinking about going straight into a 15 year mortgage to force herself to pay it and it was gonna make her budget really difficult.

So I said, what I might recommend is let’s do a 30 year mortgage and then. On the months that you can, let’s stick to it like it’s a 15 year and pay as much as you want, or you can, but then have the flexibility to not have to do that if you want, because it is a single income.

And I just wanted her to have that, that peace of mind that she didn’t have to, but she can still, and we would recommend a 15 year mortgage first. Let’s see if you can, but there are a lot of, in a lot of situations, a lot of instances where, look, you just may not be able to do something like that.

And you wanna be able to have that freedom, that wiggle room. Yeah. If you are doing, if you’re trying to do a 15 year mortgage and there’s no wiggle room in your budget Yeah. The answer is no. That is going to feel so tight, especially in seasons of if she has a baby or if she has grand babies or a change of job or there’s something that happens, she’s gonna feel that, that weight and that pressure on her shoulders.

And so yeah that, moving to that from that 15 year to that 30 year is a great move. Yeah. Peace of mind, like you said. Flexibility. Okay. So I have a client she has, her husband owns his own business and she is the CFO of it. She works behind the scenes, making sure all the money is flowing the way that it’s supposed to.

She is still in the process of trying to get everything into the one account her bills account. And she thought she had everything. And so at the end of the month when we went to go check up on April to make sure that it was alright, and I said, okay, you’re supposed to have about $473 left in this account this month so we can move it.

And actually she needed to roll that over to the following to the next month because the way that her budget was going, we had to actually make Mae’s budget early to make sure she had enough because her husband gets paid every quarter with his consulting business and we needed to make sure that money was gonna last.

So we needed to roll over some some of this $400. She didn’t have it. Oh, so it got eaten up with Apple charges. There’s like an electric car, like monthly you go charge it. Yeah. It’s like a monthly membership. Oh, whatever.

Yes, either. So she had, there was that charge, I think it’s Evie go like that charge was, and then some, there was security camera charges, all these other charges that ate up because she thought she had moved all that over into the Bills account and it had not been moved over. So it totally messed up. And then I was like, okay, no big deal.

Let’s discount. Let’s figure out how much now you have left. After all those charges came out, girl, she still was missing like 200 bucks that got used quote unquote, unexpectedly throughout the month. And so we really, I showed her like, look. I know you saw that extra money and you thought you could use it, but it actually put a huge damper in next month’s budget.

Because we needed that $400 to roll over to relieve some pressure in the month of May for you. But now yeah, we don’t have that. So we had to actually pull from another account to be able to make that work. And so I think showing her on paper, look, this is how that domino effect happened, like this is this is why we don’t wanna just use money in the account that we thought we had because it just totally derails you. Yeah. I think, there’s a couple things that stand out to me about that. First of all is it is messy. And that is what we are trying to do. We’re trying to take the messy and the chaos and the, I don’t really know what’s happening out of it by `putting it all in one account.

Unfortunately, when you have those three things you said subscriptions, ev, charge and then security cameras, those are all like optional. And that’s the deal. All of these optional things because it’s 20 15, 5 35, all these small. Yeah. You don’t think of it like your mortgage where you, you’re not gonna forget that.

You have to pay that. And so that, that’s where they get you. I, this is not even a lesson, but I had, I, that my new client, she had I think. Seven, or no, I’m sorry, 10 different channel subscriptions for Oh, I was like, because you’re not thinking about it. So anyway, part of what we want you to do is get it all in one account so that you can actually see what’s happening.

And then of course the whole, don’t spend your extra money. That’s a bonus tip. Don’t spend your extra money. Yeah. ’cause you have plans for it, girl. Yeah, it is. It was one of those things where. It wasn’t just money sitting in the account that we had left there. It was like purposely Yeah.

Being used for the following month, but because it just was sitting there on extra. So my, my goal for her next month, I’m like, we’re pulling it out. Yeah, absolutely. We are definitely removing it from the account so you can’t see it. Yeah. I think that’s important. Yeah, for sure. Okay.

I have a client, they decided, so I’ve had several clients buy a house between, in between sessions before, and it’s great. It’s you too, isn’t this great? Yeah, it’s so good. It’s fun to have like extra work or has problem solving to be able to do. But anyway, I knew it was on the horizon.

I didn’t at this, they bought this house. They did it in December. So then when they moved in they still had to pay mortgage and rent for a couple months. Their mortgage is. A little high. They bought the house right at the time that they lost a source of income. They didn’t need, did not know when was gonna ha Both were gonna happen at the same time anyway, so long story short, she’s been real tight for a while.

Because she’s had to pay double mor or mortgage and rent for, at least that’s part of the problem. And then she’s also got debt. So I, she has been good about saying, okay, we got the dream house. We got the dream house that we can have nothing else like that. We’re just gonna live here, but we can have nothing else.

And I’m like it’s really the truth. And so they’re basically been living in this house since, I think February, January, end of January. They closed without anything. ’cause it, they don’t have like furniture for it. They don’t, they’ve been, on bare minimum really, but and I’m really proud of them for doing that.

They had to face their decision, right? Yeah. Like this is the consequence of our decision and this is something we really wanted. So we gonna have to give up other stuff that we might want. But they, so she finally got her tax return. And she’s able to pay off a bunch of debts like we’ve been talking about.

Clear up a lot of that. She actually had to pay some rental damage as well, so she paid that off. And now, what was it for the May budget? Did she buy a fork? We were able to finally put a budget line item for her to be able to furnish her house. Ah, let’s go. Which so it’s just, if you make these decisions, you have to figure out your priorities and then, and I’m really excited for them.

So now they’re doing good and you guys that was a lot of sacrifice that they did these last few months. We have looked, she’s, I think she’s graduating next month. We’ve looked at her budget. She’s going to be able to save up tens of thousands of dollars by the end of the year to pay for her real estate, whatever, license or whatever.

Stuff that she needs to do or she wants to do. That’s where she’s going from not being able to buy furniture because she stuck with it and she did what she had to do to their, they have so much extra that she can finally pursue her goal. So it’s like it, you have to be in it for a minute.

But then hopefully you’ll see the fruit of that. And I love how it’s just a short season. Some people would’ve seen that situation go, Nope, I don’t wanna do that, and that’s fine, that’s not wrong. And then she saw an opportunity and go, okay, we are gonna do this, but we are willing to sacrifice.

Some people don’t wanna sacrifice and they try to move in the house, buy the furniture, and get all the stuff in. That puts them in a really icky situation. I did that. We bought a house, even though it was a really great deal, we still barely could afford it, but then we also wanted to furnish it.

And so we went to the store and that’s how we, I think that was our first debt as a married couple, was racking up furniture loans for everything. And not great. Don’t recommend it, but I feel like that’s everybody’s first. Debt kind of deal when you’re married anyway. ’cause we gotta now we gotta move in together and we wanna be adulting, yeah. We went to rooms to Go. Yeah. Which was a terrible idea, but it’s fine. And then we went to Bed Bath and Beyond. Yeah. And that was like all of our money. Yeah. And so it’s not great, but, and they conveniently offer you credit cards right there. And I definitely got them, but yeah. I’m not happy for her.

It sounds like this short se and it is short, very short. Less than what, six months of a season that she’s in to be able to make it work. It’s gonna give her all this opportunity at the end to be able to is she gonna sell her house or rent it out? No, they’re living in the, that’s their dream house.

Oh no, I’m talking about the other one. No, that was rental. So they had, oh, so it was a rental. So they were paying rental rent, renting it, and so they had to pay that and the mortgage for a couple months. And it was tough. And then they had rental damage, but that’s a lot. She got that all cleared up.

So Good. I’m excited for her.

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 I have a client who recently moved into their dream house. I could say I think it was about a year ago, that they love Costco. They love themselves with Costco. What’s, okay, so we do this what is the opposite? X whatever the, yeah. Okay. In his big thing, he’s a business owner and so is she, but he has a very successful business.

Hers is still growing but they love points. So it’s like a, for him, it’s like a saddest thing, a guy thing. They get all the points, they get to travel. I I. Hold on. Can the guys just play sports instead of this game? Can we, I know you need to be competitive and you need to win and you wanna use your skills.

Can you go play like baseball? Yeah. Go get that. And on a, an adult men’s league and do that. Yeah. Instead. Yeah. I’m for it. Please. For our case anyway. Okay. Sorry, go ahead. So they want to use their Costco card for everything because in the last two sessions I’ve had with them, it’s we get all these points and I said, yes, but you’re also overspending because you’re using a credit card instead of a debit card.

And he said, guess that’s true. So he knows that they’re overspending because they’re using this Costco card to get all these points that they’re going to spend on more food, that they’re gonna end up overspending because they think that they’re getting a discount. ’cause they’re using points. It’s like this whole mental game, right?

It’s just not worth it to, what we’ve talked about is that you need to use a debit card. You’ve gotta hold yourself accountable to the amount of money that you’re spending. If you’re saying you’re gonna spend $2,600 a month on groceries, how do you know that you’re gonna hold yourself accountable to that when you’re just throwing it all in a credit card?

You can’t, and he’s not they’re not doing that. And and they’re in a debt. They have a lot of debt on their Costco credit card. Imagine that, right? So there’s debt on the card, there’s other debt from them buying things from this house. So they did the same thing where they bought this house they could barely afford at the time they are just now trying to be able to fund everything.

But they had to use credit cards to be able to fund their life during this transition period. And one of the big points of all this is, points don’t matter, y’all. You’re in debt, okay? They’re not helping you. This is a game that you are never going to win at. They spend more money on their marketing, in their marketing department than we will ever make in a lifetime.

They’re winning. So just wanna throw that out there. Yeah. Okay. A couple things came to mind. First of all. Did you ever watch whose line is it anyway? No, I never did it. You’re too young. Okay. Anyway, he, the new version of it with Drew Carey, he would say where the points don’t matter and they’re made up anyway or something.

And so that’s just what I was thinking of. But here, really what I thought was like, this is a double whammy problem. First of all, the credit card points is a problem. That’s a trap all by itself. Yeah. But then the Costco, I wanna, I just wanna hone in on the Costco for a second. Okay. Unpopular opinion.

I understand that’s true. I am not for Costco or Sam’s Club at all. 0% pass. Do not collect money from go to jail. Okay. And I know it’s unpopular, but it’s just be the reason why it’s most unpopular is because people are, there’s this perception that it’s so much cheaper. So I just wanna throw that out there.

That’s one part. So there, there is a perception that it’s cheaper. It’s not. It’s not, I’ve done the math. And when you add in your fee, and then for us, and probably not for you, but having to get there. ’cause we don’t have one local Yeah. Is another problem. But, so it’s not necessarily, it might save you a little bit here and there, but there’s other overall Yeah.

There’s many that you’ll save at the other stores too, here or there. They all know they’re all price matching in whatever fancy way that they do it. With whether it’s like BOGOs or Rollbacks or Right. Whatever. Bulk buy. So anyway, so it’s not that much cheaper. But what it does is encourage.

Big spending. And not really planning, but saying, okay, if I get 20 pounds of chicken, that’s a good deal, and then you don’t, or whatever. I don’t even know what it is. Whatever the big deal, if I use it all but then you have to use it and you don’t plan that. You just went in and spent a thousand dollars and you have a bunch of stuff that you don’t have a plan for.

Versus with your groceries. You like have your basics that you need every week you reorder and you have a budget for that and you understand it. And then there’s all the temptation stuff in Costco that’s what they’re buying. That’s what you’re really going for. And don’t lie to me.

I know. I used to like it too. I would the first time we ever went to Costco is in Alaska ’cause there was nothing there. Okay. So I’d be like, oh, look at these pants that nobody needs that are, oh, look at this trampoline that nobody needs that are whatever they have there. So I just feel like you walk in, they have everything.

You walk in and it’s like all of this, it’s go, logging on to Amazon, it’s just so much temptation to. Spend money that you don’t need to spend, that you weren’t gonna plan on spending anyway. And it’s, but it’s such big bulky prices. ’cause you’re getting a deal. Yeah. Like when you use the coupon for the thing that you weren’t gonna buy, that’s not a deal.

Yeah. That’s like you spent money that you weren’t planning to spending. Yeah. So anyway. Am I done with my rea? I’m not sure. Its just you’re spending way more money than you think that you were gonna spend it. Like Shana said, had you just gone to the grocery store and bought the groceries? Yeah. You would’ve come out there probably saving $300.

Hold on. So now we have three. Okay. Because that reminds me, so we said it’s not really that cheap. It’s not you spend money that you’re not planning to spend and then you have to store the 30,000 rolls of toilet paper, rolls of toilet paper that you got. Like, where are you putting it? Okay. That’s what I wanna know.

Now if you have storage, Griff. But anyway, so those are our three. That’s where we’re done. I’m done with my rant. I can move on. I’m ready. I can bury it. Are you, do you have more? No, I think you covered it. Okay. Okay. Basically, guys, just don’t do it. Just don’t do it. We love you. Okay? So we hope that you love those lessons and we’ll see you next time.

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