Hey guys, welcome to today’s video with me Lyle, I’m excited to have you with me today in today’s video, we are going to be talking about budgeting.
Yeah the B word right before you think that oh no not another video telling me that I cant spend my money on this so I can’t do this or oh I’ve got to live within my means and I know that but I just don’t want to do that.
Well not the purpose of this video.
The purpose of this video is just to share a few mistakes that I’ve made when it comes to personal finances.
And then also just some tips of things that you can do which will help you take control ofyour personal finances.
So let’s up straight and into this video.
So as I said, this video is going to be about budgeting and I’ll share with you at the end why we don’t budget and what it is that we actually do.
But what is the budget at extremely high level budget looks at income and expenditure and making sure that you aren’t spending more than what you get in, right?
There’s lots of different principles if you got and you google the word budgeting or personal finances or how to budget.
You’re probably going to discover one of the top Um results is going to be the 50, 30 20 principle.
And what it looks at is making sure that you’re spending 50% of your income on your needs like your house.
I’m in the house at the moment and I thank God for that on food on your utilities like electricity or water and things along those lines.
And then the 30% is going to look at spending your resources on your one.
So what is it that I want to do?
I want to travel, I want to buy a house, I want to buy a car, things like that and then 20% making sure that you’re setting aside 20% in terms of savings and investing.
The problem that I have with this particular ▪ principle or rule is What if I’m spending 55%, am I gonna knock myself over there and say, Oh you did it again, you spend more.
Um Even within that 50%, they say that you shouldn’t be spending, I believe it’s 25-30% of your funds on on housing.
But it doesn’t look at your unique circumstances. Doesn’t look at where you live.
What if you live in a city like new york city or Oslo in Norway?
Hey Oslo, I don’t think there’s any. But if you’re watching this video, but you never know Right?
But let’s say you find yourself in an expensive city and all of a sudden you can’t spend more than 25%.
But what if that’s the only place that’s available, what do you do then?
So ▪ again, I’m gonna show you what it is that we do.
So while these are great principles and some people swear by it that this is the only way to take control of your personal finances.
I believe that you need to find a set of principles that you can tweak for your own lifestyle.
But it’s good to have principles to help you make your decisions right? Okay.
So the first thing I wanted to to consider is ▪ ▪ what do you make on a monthly basis?
Do you know what that is?
Most of the people I’m asking this question, whether it’s watching this video right now, you know exactly what you make on a monthly basis, whether it is as an individual or if you are a married couple, what you make as a married couple.
▪ But here’s the next question that oftentimes ask people and that is ▪ what do you spend on a monthly basis?
▪ And I’d probably say seven out of 10 times when I asked this question, people are like, oh man, ▪ I don’t actually know ▪ um or I think I spent this, but they don’t have a true understanding of what it is that they spent.
So what I want you to do right now is just pause this video after I tell you what to do um and write down what it is that you think that you spend on a monthly basis.
Okay, so now that you’ve done that um you might be saying, I just don’t know how to do that.
So how do I come up with this amount?
So what you need to do is get your bank statements out as well as your credit card statement.
So if you are making use of online banking, go onto the website of your bank and download the last three months bank statements and three months um credit card statements.
If you want to go beyond that, that’s fine too.
▪ If you don’t make yourself online banking, get those paper statements out of the drawer.
And the reason for this is and not just looking at the last week in the last month is you want to identify a trend?
What am I actually spending money on a regular basis?
▪ You can either write that down or if you’ve got Excel or google sheet, type it into those programs and you’ll have a clear indication with regards to what you are spending your resources on.
Okay. The next thing that you need to do is ▪ once you’ve identified what you spend your resources are ▪ I want you to ask yourself this question.
▪ ▪ Am I shocked that I’m spending my resources on, ▪ Am I spending money on the things that’s really important to me?
▪ For me personally, I like traveling and I like going to visit my family in South Africa.
But if I’m not sitting aside any resources for ▪ that, is it really important to me.
So this is looking at more from the value based sort of approach as opposed to making sure that you’re eating those percentages and ▪ that’s kind of what I’m jumping get over here real quick, that’s what we do.
▪ We identified the start of the year, what’s important to us ▪ and then making sure that our goals with the leading of the Holy spirit ▪ ▪ and what the word of God directs us to do that.
▪ Those are the factors are describing our spending.
▪ So if I truly ▪ believe that traveling is important to me, that’s going to be a goal and part of my savings is going to be to set aside funds for that.
▪ If I believe that being debt free is God’s based for me.
And if I do have debt, ▪ then I’m going to have a plan in place that says that X amount of money that comes in is going to go towards my goals.
▪ ▪ But if it’s that’s not an important thing to me, then I’m gonna be spending money on something else.
But again, unless I’ve paused, identified what’s truly important to me and what God has spoken to me as a priority for this year or next year or two or three years, ▪ I’m just going to spend the resources that he brings into my end as I would please.
And it might not be on bad things, but it’s not gonna get me closer to my destiny.
And as you stick around on this channel, you’ll come to realize a few things, number one, God is important to me is the most important to me.
The word of God and making my decisions on the word of God is of extreme importance.
But then in addition to that, I want to help you to get closer to the destiny that God is created you to live out and to fulfill on this earth.
So I’ll be sharing financial tips but I’ll be sharing some other tips to.
It’s just a little tug for for this channel.
▪ So you’ve paused and you are you going to pause after this and you and I want you to just reflect.
Set aside time and identify what’s just dream. What does God speaking to? What’s important to you?
And then comparing those goals to what you spend new resources on and you know what ▪ you can change.
There’s always time to change. If you see that you’re spending too much of your resources are eating out too much of your resources on on your vehicle, too much of your resources on you name it.
And it’s not getting you closer to the things that’s really important to you.
Maybe you need to make some changes, some hard changes, pray about it.
If you, if you’re an individual and then make those changes.
If you have a spouse, if you’re married, pray about it together and see what you need to do right now ▪ in order to get you closer to your goals.
And I’m not saying make drastic decisions.
I believe that you need to pause here from God and then in addition to that do it gradually.
If you feel that you want to be setting aside more money for your your future.
But you already you don’t have any more income.
Ask God to give you wisdom with regards to how you can generate extra income.
But very important when that extra income comes in, ▪ channel it towards the goal that displaced in your heart.
▪ And they just finally guys just ▪ once we’ve identified ▪ income or expenditure, what our goals on what it is that we want to be spending our resources are you gonna need to track track track track?
There’s two ways you can go about doing this every time you go to the store you can write it down on a piece of paper compared to what you had planned to spend.
You can use an app to, if you are in South Africa, there’s apps like 20 to 7 if in the states there’s mint, there’s wine ab there’s every dollars, lots of absent.
Uh I’ll let you guys know at a future date.
I’ll do a video on, on just some upset that we have tested and what we are are using alternatively.
▪ The other thing and what we do is because we’ve got this plan in place and we know how much we can spend on different categories.
The only thing that we personally track is our discretion a little spending.
So we’ve got our fixed costs like our housing, our cars actually we are debt free when it comes to cars praise God for that.
But when we had a car we knew that it was gonna be X.
Amount of dollars for our car, we knew that our house would be a certain amount.
So we made sure that those are covered and then any money that was left over just going towards our goals like savings.
But then we had a little pool of money left over for things like eating out um going to concerts, going to events.
Those are the things that I needed to kind of track and not looking at it every time.
But I just knew that because the money goes into a separate bank account, I knew that this is the only amount of money that’s available for those sort of things and ▪ I’ll do another video where I dive deeper into how we manage that discretion allele banking account or checking account or if you want to use something called the envelope system with cash, how you can just monitor those expenditures while everything else is on autopilot.
▪ Okay and then finally guys, ▪ if you find yourself in a position actually you’ve map things out and you just feel like there’s no hope, remember ▪ God is good to you, you’ve got the spirit of Christ on the inside of you, he gives you the wisdom and he can get you out of the situation that you find yourself in.
It might have taken you 10 or 20 years to dig yourself into this position ▪ and it might not happen overnight where you all of a sudden out of it.
But if you seek him for wisdom, he will give you strategies with regards to how you can get out of the situation into a place where you can give more into a place where money in these sort of constraints is not something that you are are concerned about.
We should never be concerned because we should cast your cares upon the Lord because he cares for us.
But what I mean by that is where you have to count every penny before you, you can spend it, ▪ okay?
And then finally just a little bonus tip when it comes to budgeting, which or spending which sometimes people forget to to mention this is very important is ▪ having a sinking fund ▪ sinking like you know like where it’s just there, you can’t touch it or just looking at things that you spend money on on an annual quarter basis.
That might not be a monthly expenditure. So as an example, we’ve got Home Association due to H. O. A.
Dues because of the neighborhood that we live in and we know every month or every court actually we need to spend, I think it’s 100 and $50 at the moment might be more.
Um But we’ve got this amount every year.
So instead of waiting until that month, like oh my goodness, like I don’t have the 1 50 if I know that it’s gonna be 1 53 months time, I can set aside $50 a month, ▪ four months 3 and when it comes to that month I can pay them same with your car insurance.
You know that you’ve got car insurance that you need to be paying now in the States, we paid every six months.
So instead of just waiting for the six month mark it, oh goodness.
I need to pay ▪ this amount of money, I’m gonna have to use a credit card.
No, I know that it’s going to happen so I can see it aside ▪ The resources four months 6.
That way I can just pay it.
▪ And the final one that just comes to mind also is like your car registration.
If you’ve got a car on an annual basis, you need to pay that if you know what the amount is set aside funds now for that you guys, these are just things that we’re doing and it helped us to take the burden of, of just how to manage finances off our plate.
If I may call it that way we’ve got a system in place and I’m gonna teach you in the videos that, that I share on this channel, how we automate our finances, how we set aside funds for our goals automatically.
The apps that we use. But I thought this would be just a good intro with regards to what budgeting is helping you to identify where you are today because if you don’t know where you are today in terms of your income, less expenditure, how do you get to the next place again, If you find yourself in a position where your expenditure is more, you might have to make some hard decisions right now.
But it’s gonna be beneficial for your future if you find yourself in a position where you are spending less pausing identifying what your goals are and if you know what your goals are, am I spending those resources on my goals?
And if not what I need to change today?
And again, not these drastic changes like I’m not gonna do this because this is my goal for some of you that works.
But for others like myself when I tried to lose weight as an example for three months I did these things, but I never really took hold of me until I found something that really worked and I could really incorporate into my day to day life and therefore it becomes a natural progression to my goal of my desire to wait.
And it’s the same with finances. What is your goal? ▪ What are your goals are your values?
▪ And let’s gradually turn the ship, turn the rudder right to get us to that place until that’s in a place where it’s happening automatically and we can get closer to the place that God has called us to be.
So I hope this helps you guys. If you like this video, please click subscribe below.
If you find yourself in a position the way you feel without hope, remember God is a good guard and he’s got a plan for your life and he can turn your situation around and finally this video can help somebody else out there that you know that might be in a position where they need help with their personal finances or just how to take control of their lives in order to get to the Destiny, share this video and tell them to come and subscribe to this channel and click on the notification button so that you’ll be notified with regards to when I’ll be sharing more videos.
So God bless you guys and remember God is good ▪ and he’s got a good plan for your life.
You’ll be hearing that a lot for me on this channel.
This is not just the channel about money and and and generosity and things like this.
This is the channel where I want to share these practical tips with you, but also to remind you of the plan of God for your life.
So God bless. This is la Weber from generous lifestyle and I look forward to seeing you guys soon.