- Hey everybody, welcome
back to my channel. So after I made the video where I talked about how my partner and I manage our joint finances, a lot of people were requesting more personal finance content. And I love talking about money. You know I love talking about money. But also, disclaimer, not an expert. I am someone who is entirely self taught from personal finance YouTubers and online content. I'm passionate about this subject area, but when I do make finance content, I think I'm just gonna do it from my own personal experience, personal perspective,
I'm not gonna tell you what to do, just gonna talk about me, (chuckling) 'cause I have
a whole YouTube channel to talk about me. But hopefully, there are still some things to take away from this, just as somebody who isn't an expert, and is also just like, living their life, and trying to be as financially responsible as possible. Is responsible the word? Knowledgeable, and
understanding of finance, and really trying to apply some of things that I learn in my life, and also just making it up as I go along. So in this video, I wanted to talk about how I'm planning for this year, for 2021, financially. Because of everything that is happening, everything that has
happened in the last year, with the pandemic, I think it's really
important to take stock, and have a plan in place. If that is possible for you. I mean, whatever your financial situation, it is always possible to have a plan. So this is what I'm doing. And as you will see from my list, it is very minimal. We're not putting too much
pressure on ourselves. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. So, let's dive into it. The first thing that I'm doing, slash have already done is taking stock of 2020. So as you saw from my
joint finances video, I have a spreadsheet
for our joint finances, and then I also keep one for myself, for my personal finances too. And so at the beginning of the year, the beginning of January, I just sat down with the spreadsheets, and I took stock of how
our finances changed, how the pandemic impacted our spending, and our budgets. We also remortgaged
this flat in September, and that increased our mortgage payments per month. So that also needed to
be taken into account, because if I just took
what we spent on bills for 2020, and applied that to 2021, that would not be relevant. Because only for the last four months of the year did we have
an increased mortgage, so I need to make sure
that that is budgeted for for the entirety of 2021, rather than just automatically taking our 2020 numbers. Another thing that we did in 2020 was get married, and have a wedding. And that is not something that we're planning on doing in 2021. So those are lines in the budget that we can take out! So that is what taking stock of 2020 looked like for me. And then also, because I use Monzo, the Year in Review, Year
in Monzo just came out. And whilst this doesn't necessarily inform my financial planning, it's a lot of fun. And also, really curious about how the pandemic
impacted my spending. My year in Monzo review is here, and I am excited to see how many times I went to Greggs. 2020, what a year. Yes indeed. How I spent. It says 50% of my money
is spent on general. But I basically put everything in general when it's moving money between accounts, so the money that I put
from my personal account into our joint account just goes into general, and that's like the
majority of my spending. 28% was on finances,
what does that even mean? I don't know. 10% on bills. Here we go, right, 2.2% on holidays. 2% on shopping. 1.9% on groceries. Most of my groceries come out of the joint account. 1.5% on entertainment. That would normally be a lot higher. 1.4% on eating out. Monzo count takeaways as eating out. I think those two are
very different things. 0.5% on transport, oh, God. Oh, this is funny, it shows you like your online versus in person transactions per month. And I'm doing loads of
in person transactions in January, probably
because I was on holiday, and then it plummets. And then you see a peak in online transactions. But then, in the later summer months, I think this is like maybe August, September time, my in person transactions overtakes online again. We have a hard plummet for in person transactions
in May. (chuckling) So I did spend in three
currencies this year. British pounds, US dollars, and whatever the currency is in Turkey. But I went to the US in January and Turkey in February. This is what we wanna know, top eating out spots. McDonald's is number one again! Damn it, (chuckling) I was hoping that that wouldn't be the case. It was my number one in 2019 as well. Oh dear. And then Just Eat and then Greggs! (laughing) Yay! I'm in the top 13% of McDonald's fans. I don't know if that's something I wanna be proud of. (chuckling) Right, entertainment. I think this might be taking into account our joint account. Because Spotify and Netflix comes out of our joint account. Interesting. And then two payments to Steam. (chuckling) Buying games. Only two, hm. Correction, didn't read the beginning. It says, we've created this just for you using insights from your personal account and joint account if you have one. So, here's the thing, I think that my personal spending in McDonald's was lower than last year. However, our joint spending at McDonald's definitely exists. And our joint spending at Just Eat, I should have clocked that, because Just Eat, we
get takeaway together. Anyway, okay, so this is both. Let's go shopping. Boots, Amazon, Wilko. (chuckling) How glamorous. I created seven pots in 2020. Here's what you added and took out. Well, a lot of money
got taken out in June. And I think that's because we paid for a bunch of wedding and honeymoon stuff, (chuckling) in June. Oh, dear. I'm glad it put the joint
stuff in there as well. But, I wish it separated it a bit, 'cause I wanna know how many times I went to McDonald's, versus how many times Dan and I went to McDonald's. And that leads me to point number two, in my financial planning for this year, which is ignoring my spending habits from last year. So we took stock, and then I'm just gonna
ignore it. (chuckling) But I'm not ignoring it all, the specific bit that I'm ignoring is my personal spending. Because my personal spending for 2020 was significantly lower than it was in 2019. So when I'm planning for 2021, I'm actually taking my 2019 numbers, because that is more realistic to a non pandemic life of mine. And even though we are
currently still in the pandemic, still in lockdown, for me, it's better to budget for
the more expensive life than the cheaper life. For you, it might be different. Your spending might have gone up during the pandemic. And so whichever one is higher, your 2019 spending, or your 2020 spending, take that one. So for my personal account, my 2019 spending is higher, so that's what I'm budgeting for. For our joint account, our 2020 spending was higher. So that's what we're taking into account. The reason I'm doing it this way is so that for my personal account, if we do come out of this pandemic, and suddenly I start spending money in a normal way for me, then I actually have that money to spend, I've budgeted for it. If we stay in this
pandemic for much longer, then that's fine, I can save that money that I have allocated. And then for our joint account, I didn't want to go
back to our 2019 budget, because we're spending more than that. And if we stay in this pandemic, and if we stay in lockdown for longer than we expect, then we have that blanket, like we know what our lockdown pandemic spending habits are now, and so we can plan for that. Does that make sense? So the third thing that I am doing, and I kinda already mentioned this, is saving for post pandemic joy. So the reason why my personal expenses are significantly lower in the pandemic than they are previously is because of the things that I would spend money on that had nothing to do
with Dan. (chuckling) And these things are
pretty high ticket items, because they were mostly theatre tickets and holidays with friends. So if this pandemic comes
to an end this year, at some point, who knows, I'm gonna wanna go on holiday with my friends, I'm gonna wanna go to the theatre, and I need the money there in order to do that. This is something that is important to me, it's important for my joy. And so I am saving for that. Your priorities may be different to mine. But basically, I'm saving for post pandemic joyful activities. I don't want it to get to a point where the government are suddenly like, enough of you are vaccinated, you're free to do as you please. And I'm like, oh my god, all of the things that I wanna do, oh wait, no, I spent
all of that money, oops. And so we're making sure that doesn't happen. (chuckling) It just turns out that the things that I want to do are expensive. Theatres, and holidays. But then also smaller things that when you live in
London really add up. Like going out for drinks or meals with friends. That shit adds up, and I'm gonna want to do a lot of that. And then also train tickets to go visit family! (imitating sobbing) All of those things in my head are going to add up, and I have to get it into my mind that I will be back to my
2019 level of spending. Maybe even more, because I'll be just so desperate to do things. And doing things costs money, sometimes. There are things that you can do for free. The next thing on my list, instead of being a footnote to the previous one, it needed to be its own thing. And that is managing expectations. Because, maybe I won't get to do any of those things. Even if we do get the
pandemic under control in the UK, even if enough people are vaccinated, so we can kinda go about
our normal lives here, it may be a while until we can internationally travel anywhere, or there may only be certain places that we're allowed to travel to. Like, who knows? So whilst I can save for
the post pandemic joy, I also have to manage my expectations, and kind of prepare for
not meeting it very soon. As you can see, the managing expectations
is hard. (chuckling) But for me, it's really important, and I think just in terms of financially planning
for 2021 in general, managing expectations is so important. If there are certain savings goals that you want to hit, if there are certain debts that you want to overpay, have those goals, absolutely have those goals, but manage expectations, because just no idea what this year is gonna throw at us. And then the final thing
that I'm doing in 2021, that Dan and I are doing
financially in 2021 is building our emergency funds. So we each have our own
personal emergency fund, and then we also have a joint one. Currently, my personal emergency fund and our joint emergency fund are at about one month, one and a half months, maybe. And I want to get my
personal emergency fund up to three months. And Dan and I have also set the goal that we want our joint emergency fund to also be three months. With our savings rate this year, and what we're able to put into our emergency fund, we're actually not gonna hit that three months by the end of the year. But that is fine, 'cause we just know that we're working towards it. And that's something that we are prioritising this year. When I talk about an emergency fund in terms of months instead
of amount of money, that's because an emergency fund is basically there for if your income disappears, automatically decreases, it's like, how much money do you need to sustain the life that you have? So what's your committed spending? What's your regular spending? What are your expenses every month? And how long will you be able to live off your emergency fund, if you have no other income? Three months is a really good start for an emergency fund, so that's what we're building towards. But a lot of the finance-y people that I follow say that you should aim for six months. And then some people I follow are like, we're trying to get a
12 month emergency fund. And I'm like, whoa. Imagine just being able to live for an entire year, with no extra income, you lose all your income, and you're like, it's fine, I've got this emergency fund. The dream. (laughing) But it's not the case
of when you're saving your emergency fund, you just take this massive lump sum, and you go, boom, here, now I have an emergency fund. It's just something that you build over time. And it's good to know what your monthly expenses are, so that you can keep an eye on your emergency fund, and you actually know how much wiggle room that amount will give you. So there you have it. I told you it wasn't that many things. Emergency fund, planning for joy, managing expectations, and
then obviously taking stock of the last year, and
planning accordingly. Last year, we had the re-mortgage and the wedding, and this year, we're trying to conceive. But honestly, I'm gonna
be completely honest, baby stuff is not something
that we have factored into our budget at all at the moment, but I know that we have
enough wiggle room, and also we just don't know how long it's gonna take us to conceive. If you wanna follow that journey, I'm making new videos
of the Hormone Diaries over on my Hannah Witton channel. We haven't even started thinking financially about it, but also we're not pregnant yet. In my mind, we'll start
planning financially for having children once
we have dates in mind. And I know some people
might disagree with that, being like, you can start
planning for it now. But I just don't want to. (laughing) Is that bad? I don't know. Told you, I'm not a financial expert, I'm just a person figuring this shit out. But yeah, that's just me. Let me know in the comments how you're planning financially for 2021, if you have any better advice than me. (laughing) And thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in my next video, bye.
