How to Build Your September Budget (Without the Overwhelm)

 Okay. It’s almost September. And what does that mean, Vanessa? Oh, well my first thought was many pumpkin spice lattes, but no, we are building September’s budget with you guys. Yes, we are here at the end of August, which means we need to start looking ahead at September, and so we do this every month.

Hopefully you can follow along and use this as your reminder to build next month’s budget, which in this case is September and fall back to school. All the things are happening and we’re excited to dive in with you.

 All right. So what is coming back into like school season? Regular flow of life? Mean, it means we’re making budgets consistently.

Y’all, like summer has come and gone? Mm-hmm. Like we’re done with, we’re, we’re, we’re past that. There’s a lot at the end of the year, Shayna. Mm-hmm. Right. We’ve got holidays, we have events. School is starting, like there’s a lot going on, so we wanna make sure we have a good budget in place. Mm-hmm. So that way you’re prepared for all those things financially?

Yes. We do wanna make sure of that. And what is the first step that we always want to do before we even dive into building the next month’s budget? Well, we’ll tell you. Yeah. Since you asked, they asked. Right? I could hear ’em asking. We’re going to close out the last month’s budget. Yep. What does that mean for you?

So, you know, this podcast is airing on august 25th. Okay. So you should be making your budget right around August 25th, or, or maybe, you know, that week you’re gonna make the budget. And you’re gonna go and click everything off of August, update any amounts that needed to happen.

Add any spending that maybe you hadn’t planned for and just see where you land and close out the month. For some of you, that means I had $200 left that I, I knew was gonna ha hopefully happen by the end of the month, and I’m gonna put that on debt. Or for some of you, it means it can mean different things, but you just wanna close out those numbers for August.

Yeah. And if you have our budget system, it’s awesome. Which you should. Yes, everybody should, obviously, but. You, you can check off, right? Oh, so if you have the budget system, it allows you to check, use your, the little check marks important. Yeah, it is really important. ’cause it like satisfies that the completion of the thing, right?

That the bill has been paid, the spending money has been transferred, the, the money has been transferred into, into your savings buckets, right? So all that’s happened, and if you’re watching us. Via the video, then you can, you’re seeing Shayna go ahead and click all the buttons to show you. I’m just go, just like therapy.

What it does, it really is. So it’s just really nice. It’s very, and it, it allows you to go, okay, like Shayna said, what happened this month so I can better plan for either next month or next year or during that timeframe. So again, closing out the month to be able to move on to the next month. Yes. And we do this with our clients.

We make sure, so they might have some, like we said, extra at the end of the month or they might. Have overspend or something. We just wanna get the numbers to mm-hmm. What? So we know what’s really truly happening. And then we’re gonna move on to September. Yep. Okay. So what’s the first thing we’re gonna do when we are building a budget?

It’s really exciting. It’s the best part. Yes. So we are gonna talk about our income. Before we do that, I wanna say somebody sent in this budget. Mm. So we had some requests about making a budget with a specific. Income. Yeah. Lower than the last, last month we did clients that make 20,000 or so a month or however much it was, and we had a request to make more realistic budgets.

And I will say, they said in the Facebook group, and if you’re not in there, you can always go to budget es.com/facebook and join our free group. Mm-hmm. They said. Is anybody discouraged? And we had one of our clients comment, she said, no, it’s not discouraging. Was anybody discouraged? They said, was anybody discouraged that they were listening to a podcast with so much money?

Mm-hmm. Or a budget that has so much money? And our client that has a lot of money said, Nope. Because it just shows me that doesn’t matter how much money you have. You’re the still the same problems are happening, and I think that is true. The, the same problems, but also the same concepts apply to everybody.

Well, and I think it’s fair to say too, we have a lot of clients coming to us that are only making 6, 7, 8. $9,000. Mm-hmm. Like, not everybody who comes to us that works with one-on-one with us is making $20,000 a month. We, and, and, and to be fair, the budget we already had in place for September was making 7,000.

And then this person in the Facebook group said, Hey, I would love to share my budget. We whitewashed it, obviously, so nobody can tell who this is. But this budget that she sent us in their income level is $8,000 a month. So we think this is a really great way to show you how, like Shayna said, it doesn’t matter the income.

It’s just like, what can that amount of money do for you and how can it serve me best? Yeah. Okay. So this these folks this person is really active in our Facebook group and she’s really wonderful. Mm-hmm. I’m just, I love, I love watching her win and she’s getting closer and closer to where she wants to be.

So we’re really grateful to have that. So this particular, income and budget has a lot going on. So this person, we have a husband that gets paid weekly and a wife that gets paid twice a month on Fridays, and then the husband gets paid every week.

And so one thing that we would say that might make it a little easier to clean it up is just when you’re putting your income in, try to put it in when you’re going to get. The paycheck, like in order of paychecks. Mm-hmm. You know? Mm-hmm. In the month. Yeah. For me, it’s just exciting to be able to check them off the order, the order that they’re listed, and so they put all their income in here, they put the child support.

So we’re doing really, really great. Good job with that. Mm-hmm. Yep. So after you list all of your income, remember it isn’t just paychecks, it’s child support, it’s alimony, it’s money you made from a garage sale. It’s money you made from. Facebook marketplace, like it’s bonus s Yep. Yes. Bonuses, commission, everything.

Every penny that you make that month is going into this section. Yeah. So once you finish that, we’re gonna move on to the debt column. And in the debt column, we’re only . Listing the minimum amount that you owe that company.

Now it’s very, very important that you do that. So if you have it auto paying, like $50 extra on top of the minimum payment, we wanna take that out. We wanna remove that. And we’re only gonna list minimum payments here. Yes. And I have to tell you, I, it looks like this particular budget perhaps isn’t doing that because we have some very round numbers, very specific numbers, and she has budgeted down to zero.

So she might have changed it. After she did. But what we would want you to, what you wanna do is what Vanessa said. You’re gonna list them all out and only put the minimums to begin, and then the best practice will be later. To put like extra, yeah. Extra payments separately so that you can check them off all separately.

Mm-hmm. Not just in one conglomerate. We don’t want you to have to, like, I have people that, you know, they have house cleaners or whatever. I’m not gonna put the whole total amount. I wanna put each week what you’re doing so we can check it off, because some months you might have five payments or whatever.

So we just, we want you to be able to know, yes, I, I have two payments done, but two to go. And you wanna be able to see all of this separate. So in this case, you know, one of the things that we’ve, we always want you to notice is how much of your money is, how much of your income is going to debt and is available to see on our budget.

We, it does it automatically. I think it’s really important Shayna to, to hone in on that. That like if you tithe weekly, I think you need to put that in there weekly. Yeah. If, like Shannon said, if the house cleaner comes weekly, put that in. If your debts are being pulled out multiple times in the month, you need to put that in separately and we, let’s have a conversation about that too.

I just had a new client sign on and like, well, we pay our car payment twice a month. It’s pulls out when we get paid. So that way it’s, it’s the accountability factor. They wanna make sure they have the money available when they get paid so they have it. Paying that way, but I reminded them you are now paying two extra payments a year because of that, and you’re probably already ahead and we need to actually like clean up your budget to see how much money extra you have.

So that’s a whole conversation on itself. But what we’re saying is, is you need to only list the minimum payments and then all the extra that you have, then we can decide how much extra you’re gonna put on debt. And we’re gonna tackle one thing at a time. Mm-hmm. Because if you have a piece of string and you cut it in five different.

You cut it five different ways, right? You can’t really go very far with those little pieces of string, but if you keep it all together, you can go further faster if you have it all in one direction. So that’s kind of what we’re trying to do here. Yeah. And, and so the $2,000 the fact that they’re paying 2000, I do think that, that she’s paying extra on debt.

That’s why she got her budget down to zero. Mm-hmm. But just But where and how much? Yeah. Yeah. Well, but imagine in this, in this case, and think about what your debt minimum’s equal, right? What you could do with 2 2200, they are $2,200. So they’re making, bringing in $8,000. You know, one fourth, more than one fourth of their income is going straight to debt.

Right. So that’s just, that’s the whole point of getting on the system and, and, and doing it is so that you can hopefully get, get beyond that and be able to put more of that money in savings or spending and, and more fun things. Yeah. We, we want it to be eye-opening like it is. Sometimes people see that number at the bottom of the column.

They’re like, oh my gosh, I had no idea I was spending that much money. Yeah. On just on minimum debt payments. Yeah, but that’s the point. It’s to get you fired up. It’s to get that, that going inside of you. So you wanna do something about it. Yep. Okay, so then we go after that, we, so we have done the income, right?

Mm-hmm. We always start with the income. So we’re checking those off, not because they’ve happened, but just so that you if you follow along on video, you can know where we’re at. The next thing we’re gonna do is your bills. And again, we want you to list out your bills. List ’em all out. Figure out how much you’re owing and their due dates, and then when you put ’em in your budget, try to put ’em in order.

’cause it’s just gonna make your life easier. To cleaner, but yeah. So here’s the bills and bills. Listen, any bill is anything with a due date, literally anything with a due date. So, and an invoice is, is a good indicator that it’s a bill. Mm-hmm. Right? Not spending, so you’re gonna have all your normal things that you might expect, your mortgage, your utilities, all of that.

But then we’re also gonna put the pan like this person has. Pandora music that used to be your music go-to for a while. Yeah. A Amazon Prime. That’s where you can watch chosen now that I just found that out, that’s where that’s on. So that’s important. And then they have some other stuff. They have Amazon Prime and then Prime video.

Sorry. So separate. Yeah. So all of her subscriptions would go down here too. And I did mention last time, and I’m gonna mention it again, I’ve actually been separating the subscriptions down in the bottom. Mm-hmm. Half of the Bills column, so you can see, because, you know, she’s, she’s been doing really good.

This person that’s it’s conservative. She’s, and she’s been like really on this journey for a minute. So she’s doing good. But when you first do this guys, you might see all of the subscriptions you’re paying for and realize. We have some duplicates that we don’t need. Yeah. And so if you can put them altogether, it’ll be easier to see that.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So one thing I wanna point out here, they have a transfer station, which is their garbage, and it looks like they probably pay this quarterly. We’re not sure. Yeah. Again, somebody sent in this budget, we whitewashed it to to the generic names and labels that we thought it was so.

$350 in one month is a lot of money. Mm-hmm. Right. So what we want, the, the idea here is that you are paying for this, this month, and then you have an annual bills section that mm-hmm. Shayna just put on there right now. And so from, from this point on, you are taking that three 50 and you’re dividing it by three and going, okay, if I put a hundred and something dollars.

Away every single month, then I’ll be able to afford that $350 every quarter when it comes due. And I no longer have to pull $350 out of one month’s budget to make this work. Yeah, that’s the goal here. Yeah. Yeah. So they have all of their bills listed. And so as we do that, you know, and we didn’t take everything off, but what, what the budget is doing here, guys, is subtracting as we go.

We are doing all the mandatory things. We don’t, we do not actually divide your. Your budget and wants and needs. Yeah. But we’re sort of going at like, in the order that things are gonna happen. Like you’re gonna pay your debt, you have to pay your debts and then you have to pay your bills. And then now we have a really good picture with what’s left, left over that we can put towards spending and savings, right?

Yeah. All right, so this next category, this is where you live in your budget. This is where you’re getting Chick-fil-A’s, where you’re gonna targets where you’re buying groceries and dinner for the house. Where you’re getting your gas, right? This is where you have your fun money. So you wanna list this and maybe this is the first time you’ve ever put a number on like what you’re spending on groceries.

So you’re probably gonna get it wrong a couple months in a row, and that’s okay. The point here is just try to guesstimate and you know, do a best guess here. The 90 day audit is a great way to start. Kind of filling this in but just know and be okay with mm-hmm. Tweaking it over the next couple of months.

Yeah. And so these folks, their grocery budget is $800 and they have, it is a family and I can’t remember. How many kids they have. But so they’re eating as a family for $800 a month, which is great. They’re you know how unfortunate that their gas bill, I like to pay for gas almost as, as much as groceries.

So they must have a commute car or something. And so then they have family fund budgeted, which family fund is a great catchall label in your budget for going to restaurants, going bowling, going to the local baseball game, like whatever things that you wanna do as a family you can put in there.

Okay. Here’s one you might need to put in September’s budget of, well, apparently there’s going to be K-pop demon hunters sing along. So my husband’s buying those tickets for the girls. Okay. Who knew that was a thing that something might pop up like that, but that would be a family fun of it, is what, what my example is.

And then they have their spending money $200 a month. That’s, that’s a good 50 bucks a week. That’s good. Yeah, you can totally do that. That’s doable. Yeah. So then they have, that’s what they’re planning to spend kind of consistently throughout. The The month. The each month? Yeah. Yep. So up top they have what, like Shannon said, what’s consistent.

They even have a Facebook market page section. Yeah. Vanessa wants to know more about those. I know I do. So she didn’t list a number yet, so maybe this month she wasn’t buying anything yet. But she did have it on the budget, which was fun. And then at the bottom she kind of listed, okay, what is month specific?

So she knows this month they have vehicle registration. And she’s got her pets where, whether it’s a, maybe it’s a vet appointment, maybe it’s grooming, maybe it’s both. So they got, have some stuff with their pets going on this month. Yeah. And and so the, those were the, this month things you guys for September.

What do you need? Probably now that your kids are back in school, you might find out the things that you forgot to get if you’re like me. So you might need that. Obviously Labor Day is gonna come in hot. Mm-hmm. It’s gonna be really at the very literally the very beginning. You might be having some sports in your life.

You might have. Anything like that. Maybe this, this is when the pets do my kids. Maybe you’re gonna have dentist appointments. Mm-hmm. What’s happening in the month of September for you? I will also say that Hobby Lobby puts up their Christmas decorations. Listen, in July. So if you’re like me and you love Christmas decorations, you may wanna start budgeting now.

Okay. So listen, we talked about at the end of the year, there’s a lot happening, so you may need to start now. If you’ve not, if you don’t have any of your savings buckets in yet, that’s okay. Don’t worry about it. But you may now need to start budgeting in Christmas, budgeting in. A Thanksgiving budgeting and Halloween, like all the things that are coming up.

Maybe you have a carnival. It’s a big thing in some areas where the carnival comes once a year and people are blowing like a thousand dollars that weekend on the carnival. Maybe that’s you. It’s totally fine. Put it in the budget. If you need to take three months to save up for that, that’s okay. Yeah. So we’re just saying this isn’t a great time to look ahead and see what can you start pre-planning for.

Yep. And so then the only other thing that. That you might wanna add in that I was just thinking is if you have tuition. Like right out for like college college. Mm-hmm. We, our, our folks have tuition to pay for their private school. You might have tuition, they call it tuition for preschool or daycare sometimes.

And then you might have any, any of the extracurriculars that kids are participating in. We get billed monthly for those. So you just, anyway, you just might wanna think what else needs to go in your budget. And so then you’re gonna have the, those things. And then, like Vanessa said, at this point, now, this client had already done it.

At this point, what you’ve done is you’ve taken your income, subtracted debt, subtracted bills, subtracted your regular spending, and then what you think you might need to, what might be coming up for this month, and then what’s left over. Then you need to figure out what you need to do a lot for savings.

And so you’re gonna look once you get all of that sort of running up and running savings because are a really fun thing to start. It and you’re gonna be able to assign whatever leftover money you have toward going to those things. Right? For this person in particular, Vanessa has pointed out, we clearly need an annual bill savings bucket.

We’ve got this transfer station, which, or this trash bill, which is either quarterly or, or twice a year, whatever it is. We’ve got vehicle registration. The pet visits. And it is, the pets is plural, so yes, that we probably want to start saving for those things moving on from now. Mm-hmm. So that we can be ready for we can, we can get all of it and be ready for the next time.

Well, and it looks like, you know, we said before that they are putting extra on debt. Mm-hmm. Because we have some really round numbers, so. I, that is their goal, right this month was to pay the transfer bill. They have the, the pets and then they did not put anything in their savings buckets, but maybe next month we will allow them some wiggle room to be able to take if, if we did convince her Shayna mm-hmm.

To only bring those payments down to minimum payments and, and see how much she had extra for there. So maybe she next month will start in annual bills for her transportation, for her pets, and whatever else she’s got going on. Right now she couldn’t do it, which is okay. And, but she kept the labels. I wanna keep, I wanna mention that really quick.

She kept the labels on the budget for the important savings buckets that she has her eye on. And I think that that’s really great because it keeps you like, okay, I’m gonna get there. Oh, okay. Yeah, it’s coming soon. Yeah. And I think I’m, we are a big fan of, of just, if you can, if you can start small, I think it’s, it’s really a good habit to start, see it stack up.

  So the next step is savings. So you’re gonna, you’re gonna fund your savings buckets. However, if your goal is to pay on debt, then you might do less savings. But either way, we want you to start your savings bucket. So for this particular situation we need, is she gonna do Christmas?

Because Christmas is gonna come in hot and heavy if we don’t start thinking about it now. Right. And, and is there anything else, maybe a trip or anything else that might. Need to start being funded now, even over potentially her debt goal. On the other hand, her debt payments. You guys, you, you, if you can’t see it, we have a lot that are 200, 200, 200, 200, 400, 500.

If those are not paying things off, then we’re doing stuff in a slow way. All Yeah. And we really might want to, like Vanessa said about the strings, we might want to bulk up. And, and like Vanessa put it back down to the minimums and pay one off or pay half of one off, and the next month I’m able to pay one off.

We, even if you do go back and put extra on debt, we, for the most part, we don’t want you to spread it over all of your debts. We want you to, as much as you can, put it towards one and try to get those knocked out and we don’t have access to her debt tracker. So we did not, we don’t know exactly what the situation is.

Yeah. Which is fine. But if one of these, like what if the minimum payment’s actually only 50 bucks, but there’ve been 200 here and an extra a hundred here, you are not going as fast as you could. You could be going. And everyone’s debt situation is different based on. The, the minimums, it’s based on their interest rate.

It’s based on the balance. Like when we go to make a decision with a client as far as which debt they should shackle first, it’s not always the debt snowball method. Mm-hmm. That is obviously the probably number one preferred choice, but it’s not always the case. So there’s a lot of factors to con to consider when you’re thinking about which debt should I pay off first.

Yeah. So the idea is you’re going to have laid out your income, your debts, your bills, your spending, and your savings. Okay. And then from there. If you have any money left, you’re gonna assign it to a specific goal. Right. And that’s what we’re talking about here. For this person, the goal is paying off debt.

Mm-hmm. Your goal might be to get Christmas funded. So you can, it can be the first Christmas that you pay for in cash or your goal might be that you have a big trip coming up in, in, around Thanksgiving, and you just really wanna save for that. Whatever your goal is, that’s where all your extra dollar bills, quote unquote extra dollar bills.

You wanna put them there intentionally, right on purpose, and make sure you have a goal for this month. Other goals that we have for our clients. We just want you to get the system set up please, for the love of God, get those accounts open, right? And start it. And, and, and so that might be one we might just want you to start one savings bucket, like whatever.

Mm-hmm. It doesn’t have to be a specific number goal. It could be a habit goal, it could be a system goal, but you need to have a plan or a goal for your money so that you can get this, you can keep the momentum going and, and, and be motivated to do stuff. And when Shayna’s talking about getting the system set up, the, the whole thing may be.

Overwhelming to you because you’ve never seen anything like this before. But if, if there’s one thing we can ask you to do is open up a separate spending account. Mm-hmm. Okay. That, that current one checking account that you’re using for everything we need to that, right? We need to stop that and we need to open up a separate.

Spending account. Let’s use that if you want for your gas, groceries, spending, all that. But it has to be separate from all your bills. You cannot be continuing to dip into that Bills account when you, it only is supposed to be designated to pay all your bills. Okay? And so for video purposes, again, guys, if you want to go look and follow along, I’m gonna show you.

We’re, we’re gonna show you the paycheck plan. Okay? So once you have your whole budget out and you’re like, yay, this is, this is, it’s gonna go perfectly. Yeah. Right? Which fine, if it’s not Yes, it’s okay. Then we, what we want to do is figure out your paycheck plan, figure out what it’s gonna look like. To actually what you’re gonna do with your hands, with your money.

Mm-hmm. Right. So once you’ve set it up in our budget, you can go over to the paycheck plan and it’s gonna tell you, for this particular couple, they’re probably, we’d have to ask her, but they’re probably doing their paycheck plan stuff on his paydays Weekly , so then over here we’re gonna go September and we’re gonna say four. There’s gonna be four moments, so four times that they’re, they’re doing stuff with their money. So once you get this budget set up, and once you get the systems and the separate accounts only on payday whichever one you choose, do you have to do things right. Only on payday do you have to do stuff and the first step, or like the entry level is doing it manually on payday. On payday. Mm-hmm. Until you get the system set and you feel confident and you’ve got your buffer and you you’re ready, then you can set those transfers up automatically.

Right. The paycheck plan shows you what those transfers are. Yeah. It basically takes all the guesswork out of it, like the whole how do, how do I make this happen, or how do I do this? The paycheck plan show shows you all of that, and it has all the formulas, everything set up in the background to make that happen.

As long as you set the budget up properly, it takes care of that. So the paycheck plan allows you to choose the month. It allows you to choose the amount of times you’re gonna transfer things, and it breaks it up into spending and savings. And whether it’s something that you’re doing in cash or something that you’re doing in a bank account, like transferring it digitally.

Yeah. So it literally tells you what to do with your hands. Mm-hmm. So you really wanna have the. The system, but what, basically what it’s doing is it’s taking your spending and your savings and breaking those numbers up by the amount of times that you want to transfer. Mm-hmm. So I was just talking to a friend or a client about, you know.

Sometimes people can deal with having, getting money in their account once a month. But more often people like to know, I have to, I cannot, I have to live in this two month period and if I just stick to my spending budget for two weeks, then I get more money. Right. Or, or weekly is even better. So in this case, what we would do, what they, what they would go to this and they would be able to say, okay, every week we put, we transfer $200 to our grocery account every week we transfer 150 to our gas account, 125 to our family fund.

Mm-hmm. And I like those. If, you know, depending on when the paid cycle is, it’s really nice if they’re on Friday, because all of your, all of your things, you’re gonna probably go grocery shopping, you’re probably gonna go out with a family or do whatever. Mm-hmm. You have time to actually go to the gas station.

Right? Is that just us or is everybody No, it’s me too. So you can set those up and then, and then, so that’s. That’s what you’re gonna set up for your transfers and then your savings buckets, you would do the same thing. Mm-hmm. You’ll go in and transfer whatever you’ve allotted. And then you’re gonna get your cash out and if you decide to do any spending or savings mm-hmm.

Buckets in cash, you’ll get that. It’ll tell you the amount of cash to get out. Yeah, absolutely. And based on the emoji that you, cho you chose in the budget, that’s how it categorizes it. Everything here and the paycheck plan. So because they chose cash for their spending, it’s telling them that they, they need to get out a hundred dollars and, you know, every column here is labeled.

So if Shana scrolls down, she can show you that. It totals everything up for you. So it says, okay, she needs a hundred dollars in cash this month for their spending. Mm-hmm. And she takes it out. He gets 50. She gets 50. Right. And that’s, it’s easy. If you look over to the left hand side, you see one time transfers back on the budget, the things that are month specific that you don’t need to necessarily fund for each week, right?

So if she has vehicle registration, she’s not gonna put aside $16 and 25 cents a week to be able to pay for vehicle registration. The money stays in bills, guys, okay? Your money stays in bills, and then when you go to do the vehicle registration, that’s when you transfer it out from bills into the spending and you spend on the thing, you buy the thing.

Okay? Yeah. So that’s why that is separate then. What, what she’s doing weekly. And so a lot of times really once you set your budget, you just have to look at this paycheck plan and follow it. And if you do this, it’s like your little checklist and then you have check boxes again, and then you just do this on payday and you’re done.

And then you can go back to living your life. And so we just wanted to tell you that’s the, that’s kind of like the last part of the budget. So we’ve done income, we’ve done debts, we’ve done bills, we’ve done spending and savings. Then we set goals for the month, and then we just make sure our paycheck plan is set and we hope this budget is really clear.

Again, we try to do this every single month with you guys. If you. Wanna follow along or do this run through it again. If you go to budget besties.com/budget template, you can print out our free one page budget template and fill it and hand fill it in. Obviously, ours is amazing, it’s electronic and does it all for you, but you can start with the fill in the blank one.

All right, we’ll see you next time.