Do we have a budgeting tool?
We have something better than a budgeting tool.
We have an empowering spending plan.
Budgeting tools are boring, right?
We have a workable PDF that will allow you to first eliminate emotion and get to the facts.
How many times have you experienced or heard that the facts will set you free, but we allow emotion to get in there and it takes over?
Emotion is not bad. It’s something that can be a great tool for us. But in this exercise facts are more powerful than emotions when it comes to a budgeting tool, or having an empowering spending plan.
This is for you and your family to empower you.
You call someone on the phone, and you say, “Hey, I’m lost.” What’s the first thing that they ask you? “Where are you?” This document was created for you to know exactly where you are.
You got to know where you are before you can get to where you want to go.
For example, this document will help you look at your income and your savings. Then it goes through your expenses:
- Housing
- Transportation
- Insurance
- Food
- Children
- Pets
- Personal care
- Entertainment
- Gifts
- Taxes
- Charity
It totals all of the subcategories and it gives you your profit loss.
This is a workable PDF for you.
Wendy and I do this on an annual basis, sometimes semiannually.
We’re building a new home, so we have a different set of numbers that we’re working with right now with the home that we’re living in versus the home that we lived in before. Then when we move into our new home, we’re going to have another set of numbers.
The way that I do it in my home is that we’ll go through these numbers as a couple. We have our household expenses, and yes there are some averages on some varying cost, but the total is the amount that gets deposited into the household checking account to pay the household expenses.
This document helps to raise your awareness of what is going on with your money. We encourage you to classify expenses in three different areas, a productive expense, a consumptive expense, and a destructive expense.
When you first met with me, you were challenged for the next appointment after we met and had the introduction to fill out a confidential financial questionnaire. Many of you, if not all of you, let us know how impactful it was just to write down exactly where everything was. “What do I have? Why do I have it? Is it what I thought I was getting when I first put it into place?”
Well, that experience that you had filling out the financial questionnaire is similar to the experience that you’ll have utilizing this family finance guide. It will allow you to know exactly where you are.
In that awareness of, what’s productive, what’s the consumptive, and what is destructive, you can easily start to eliminate the destructive expenses in your life.
Maybe you’re a coffee drinker, and you haven’t added up the five or eight buck coffees from somewhere with a drive-up window. Those add up. Five bucks a day, 30 days in a month. What if you mixed it up at home?
Next thing you know, you got 150 bucks here, $200 there, and you add all those up and you get 750 bucks a month going out somewhere that you just weren’t aware of.
The whole reason why we prepared the Family Finance Guide for you is to empower you to raise your awareness. We want you to be empowered by your finances. Money and finances play a major role in our life, so get on top of them.
Put a checkmark if the expense is something that produces for you, it’s working in your life.
Maybe for some reason, it’s a consumptive type thing, but you’re not sure you want to get rid of it right now.
But if the expense is just completely destructive; those are the things to work on first!
I guarantee you that if you’ll take the time and be honest with yourself and with your spouse and go through and mark in each one of these areas. Do this for a 30-day snapshot, but then do a 90-day and look at where all the money is going. That experience in and of itself of raising your awareness will assist you in quickly, with efficiency, wanting to get rid of those destructive costs. Then that’s more money that you can save into your checking savings account, transfer over into your #1 strategy to protect and produce more in your life, personally and professionally.