5 signs you're doing better with money than you think: scary money statistics

you are doing great hi how are you i hope you're having the best day ever today i wanted to tell you about five different areas where you may be ahead of the curve when it comes to getting in charge of your finances and if maybe you are struggling in these areas this may give you some motivation positive reinforcement to keep going but first if you're new around here hello my name is lydia sin and i make videos on frugal and simple living we're a debt-free family of six we paid off thirty six thousand dollars in two years on one income that was back when we only had two little babies and now we have more and i share with you how to live a great life on a budget so if you're into that hit subscribe like this video oh there's my air conditioner thank the lord it's 85 degrees in april let's go give you statistics for each point that i make and i'm gonna leave a link below so you can read through these articles and see the sources for yourself all my statistics are going to be based out of the us because that's where i live but i'm sure you can find these statistics where you live so one of the ways to know that you are doing well with money is that you know what your take-home pay is this actually surprised me it's roughly half the population so 45 of americans do not know what their actual take-home pay is they do not know how much tax is being withheld didn't know the last time that they had updated their withholding and they weren't sure how much was being taken out of their check every month and there's a couple ways that you can actually figure this out one look at your pay stub two call the payroll department in your company and see how much is being withheld and then try to determine how much you actually need to have withheld every month or every paycheck so it is tax season you have until may 17th to file your taxes this year and a lot of people get excited when they get a big refund you know personal finance is personal and if you prefer to get a big refund that's up to you it's your money however that's a sign that you're having too much withheld every single paycheck and you're letting the government hold your money interest-free where you could be investing that you could be putting it into high yield savings you could be paying off debt with it there's a lot you could be doing with your money if you just get your withholding correct the next point which kind of goes with the first one is you know how much money you're paying towards debt every month or you know how much you owe to people so 35 of the us population does not know how much money is going to debt every single month they've not sat down and calculated out five hundred and forty dollars out of each paycheck is going to pay for debt or thirteen hundred and eighty dollars from each paycheck is going to pay for debt they just see it as a monthly payment and they've never calculated the interest or how much they could save putting just a few extra dollars a month towards that debt if you think that five dollars doesn't have a big impact on your debt oh boy it does so if you have a credit card debt of say ten thousand dollars minimum payment is two hundred dollars a month which is what it would be if you have ten thousand dollars and you put just an extra five dollars a week towards that credit card pay it off several months earlier and save yourself about 900 in interest just for five dollars a week sit down today and figure out how much you're actually paying every single month towards debt come up with a plan to start paying that debt off i have lots of videos about that so if you're lost as to what to do i got you back third tip is you know how much you spend each month you are tracking your spending you know where your money is going you are on top of that spending then you are in a very slim margin of the population because 65 of your fellow americans don't know how much they're spending every month i'm gonna be honest with you there are lots of months that get away from me i go through cycles where i am on top of things i am on my game when it comes to my budget i am tracking my spending and then i have months where i'm like um what i spent what now how much on groceries oh okay well let's let's reel it in and back it up and figure out how we can correct the course because i don't want to spend that much every single month so if you just simply take two weeks if you were brand new to saving and you are brand new to budgeting if you just take two weeks and track your spending it will be so eye-opening just grab your phone open the notes app in your phone that's where i got my notes right now type in what you spend every day when you spend money and see where you can tighten up the that spending where you can fix some leaks in your budget where you can cut areas where you might need to spend more be more realistic about your budget track it just two weeks just give me two weeks i promise it's gonna be illuminating okay number four you have a budget now i was actually surprised by this statistic it was a lower than i thought it was going to be but but 38 of americans do not have a budget now of the 62 percent who do say they budget how many of them are sticking to that well if 65 don't know how much they spent obviously not a lot but i was pleased to see that it was just 38 of people who don't have some form of a budget the only way a budget works though is if you work your budget the only way you're gonna stick to it is if you track it daily give yourself a money minute and a money minute is not hard i simply grab the app i use to budget i go on my bank account i see what comes out what's come out what hasn't what's going to come out this week it takes literally one minute of my life there are a couple budgeting apps that i like i like every dollar it's free i like you need a budget it's not free but it's still a great app and the team at ynab is fantastic number five and this one's kind of sad it's very sad in light of what's going on in the world but you are current on your bills if you are current on your bills you are way ahead of a huge portion of the population in fact as a result of the pandemic one in 10 americans reported having passed due bills and younger generations gen z was actually the ones who were the furthest behind on their bills the most likely to be so people who are now in their early 20s people who have either just graduated from school are still in college they're the most likely to be behind on their bills because if you if you think about it those were the ones who may have been hit the hardest you're coming out of college and into the career force and you're either entering a time right now where it's really hard to find a job or you were the first one to lose your job you're probably not making a ton of money to begin with and you're saddled with student loans and then the demographic right behind them were my fellow millennials who i mean who many of us graduated from college directly into a recession or we were still in school during the recession and then we're now raising children and this happens and so it's been hard for a lot of families to get ahead what is sad though was in this report many of them didn't feel like they ever would get ahead and that hopelessness is hard to bounce back from and i was thinking about a video that i had made a couple years ago when i was working at walmart i was working in the produce department and my job was to almost drop my phone my job was to cull all the produce that was starting to go bad or had gone bad go through it weigh it mark it to zero in the system and then shovel it into a trash compactor so i worked from four in the morning to one o'clock in the afternoon or overnight so i would be in the back room of walmart shoveling rotten tomatoes into a trash packed compactor listening to audiobooks on my headphones even though i wasn't supposed to but i mean who was going to stop me i was in the back of the store with a shovel and i remember just feeling bad about where i was in life now there's nothing wrong with working at walmart i'd go work there again if i needed to dignity and work y'all all work has dignity all work has dignity don't let anyone tell you otherwise i remember just feeling like i wasn't where i wanted to be in my career i feel like i was on par with my peers i felt behind and disappointed and my parents came to visit me they took me to ihop um during my lunch break which was at nine o'clock in the morning so we met for breakfast and my dad saying do you remember the movie shawshank redemption and do you remember when andy dufresne tells red you know hope is a good thing possibly the greatest and a good thing never dies and i don't want you to lose hope and that's just stuck with me this whole time that my dad just believed like things are gonna get better for you and they did we ended up getting i ended up getting a job in the career that i wanted we ended up getting out of debt we moved i started a business we didn't lose hope i realized that we were in a place of great advantage i have parents who are encouraging me my husband and i both have college degrees we you know it's easy to talk about hope when you were like born on second plate you know what i'm saying so we're not all born on a level playing field how many analogies can i use in this video and you can't hope your way out of a situation but once you lose hope it's hard to get out of that situation i hope that made sense anyway i'm going to wrap this up how are you where do you find yourself in this list are you behind in any of these areas are you catching up from the past year where are you also it's okay wherever it is you are it's not a race it's not a competition and you're not on anyone else's timeline it is hard to be a human right now it is hard to keep hope alive right now it's just a hard time right now so if you're listening to this video and you think oh man i'm behind on everything no you're not it's gonna be okay it's gonna be okay start with what you have start with where you are and make a plan and know your journey are we on the bachelor is it going to look like somebody else's because you only have what you've been given you only have what's in front of you to work with so you're doing a good job and i'm proud of you all right thank you for being here i appreciate you leave me a comment below and tell me how you doing um and i'll see you soon

Channel: Lydia Senn

Views: 43,851

Rating: 4.9697113 out of 5

Keywords: Lydia Senn, five4fivemeals, Frugal debt free life, frugal, save money, debt free, dave ramsey, frugal living, how to be frugal, how to save money, spend less money, how to spend less money

Id: g-pAfwtPiM4

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021