How To Budget In Your BuJo (Even if you SUCK with money!)

[Music] hey friends Elizabeth here from plant-based bride and today I want to walk you through this little setup for a budgeting bullet journal so my husband and I share finances and we have never been able to stick to a budget any time we've tried an app or a website to budget if we've just set one up on a spreadsheet we've just never been able to stick to it long term and the other day it occurred to me that considering bullet journals have done such a great job in general for both of us and our lives why not utilize the bullet journal system to handle budgeting so I wanted to use a new notebook for this because we both have our own individual bullet journals but I wanted there to be a journal at home at all times for us to be able to check in and update whenever we want to and for it to not live in one of our bullet journals so we had to be together to check in on the budget so I'm using this grey elephant notebook from dingbats notebooks y'all know I love these notebooks if you check out the link in my description box you can get 10% off your purchase of a notebook so I wanted to start by making a little bit of a cover page just really simple as always all the materials used in this video will be linked in the description box so check that out if you're interested in the stamps or the specific color tombow I'm using it'll all be down there so for the first two-page spread I wanted to use this as a bit of a reference page just to remind us of where our priorities should be and some things to keep in mind while we're dealing with our finances on a daily basis so the financial pyramid and these money rules I loosely adapted from a book I'm currently listening to on audible called the financial diet so far I'm really enjoying it it has a very laid back approach to handling your finances and the author's Millennials themselves so I feel like on a generational level I can really relate to what they're talking about and I feel like so far all of the tips that they've suggested are completely doable things because I'm sad to say even though I'm the daughter of an accountant I'm not naturally good with money at all if you want to listen to this audiobook yourself you can try out audible for a 30-day free trial and you get two free audiobook downloads you can cancel before the 30 days are up and you can keep the book forever even if you can't sell the free trial so check out the link in my description to try out audible for 30 days for free and to get your two free audiobooks so the financial pyramid I adapted from the bank account pyramid that they talked about in the financial diet and the idea is that this is kind of the structure of your savings the top section of the pyramid would be your checking account buffer setting a limit that you keep in your checking at all times as a buffer so that you never go into overdraft on your checking so say it's $100 then anytime you're under $100 in your checking you treat that as you're at zero and until you get back up to a hundred you're treating your bank account as empty and not spending that money so it's just sort of a buffer to keep you from going into overdraft and having to pay fees and it also is great if you do end up having an emergency and you do need to spend it you do have that little extra bit of money there but the idea is that you always rebuild that immediately that's your first priority to make sure that you have that buffer in your checking at all times so the next level of your pyramid would be your emergency fund and that's where you keep money for emergencies basically the name is pretty self-explanatory and you want to keep this in a savings account that's really easily accessible the next level is your medium term savings so these are semi-liquid saving accounts and these are things that you might need to dip into the next few years say for buying a house or other larger expenses and then your final section at the bottom there which is the biggest savings would be your long-term savings long-term investments and this is where you would say be saving for retirement so this is a good to sort of visual to keep in mind how you're handling your savings and the amount that should be in each type of savings so the next side of the spread is the money rules and this I also adapted from the financial diet so the first rule is don't exceed your ability to pay back your full credit card balance each month the second rule is don't allow yourself to fall into a treat yourself mindset the third rule is do check your account balance at least twice a week and the fourth rule is don't think savings will happen magically and once I'd written those out I kind of went in and added a little bit more detail which you can pause and read if you're interested in but these were just kind of little reminders for me to be able to read up when I'm struggling with sticking to my budget to remind me why it's important to stick to these four little rules the next two-page spread is another reference page so on the left side of the page I wanted to write out our specific financial goals for us as a couple and then on the right side of the page I wanted to be able to write out our recurring monthly bills and the day they come out the amount and how they're paid so we can have a snapshot of the month and make sure that we are aware of where everything comes from when how much so we can be on top of it and organized so for the financial goals I wanted to stick to four I didn't want to do too many so our four are debt free stick to a budget savings buffer and honeymoon so debt free is pretty self-explanatory we have a little bit of debt that we want to pay off sticking to a budget as I said we've never really done a great job of sticking to a budget so we really want to make sure that we commit to sticking to this and using this being just more aware and in control of our money and to really be better about communicating about our money on a regular basis and then the third goal is a savings buffer so this is to save up a $5,000 emergency fund and also to save up at least a three hundred dollar overdraft buffer in both of our checking accounts and then the fourth goal is our honeymoon we want to make a very loose plan for our honeymoon figure out what the cost would be for what we want to do and then make a savings goal and start working towards that because we still haven't gone on our honeymoon and it's almost been three years since we got married so it's about time on the bills side I'm just setting up this little table and I'm going to be writing out the date that the bills are due a bill description PM stands for a payment method so where it's coming from whether it's my credit card or Jason's credit card or whatever and then the amount so for example rent comes out on the first I'm not writing the payment method and the amount in here for privacy sake and then on the third our internet comes out and that comes off my credit card and it's fifty nine eighty three and we're just going to sit down in a couple days once we've had a chance to go through our accounts and make sure we have everything and then write them in here chronologically so we can kind of follow it throughout the month and I think I'm also going to scan this once we filled it completely in and print out a copy for each of us to keep in our bullet journals so that we can have it with us so the next page is an income tracker page so I'm doing a table on the left side for Jason's income for July and a table on the right side for my income for July just giving us lots of spots because we're both freelancers so that every time we get paid we can write it down and we're just tracking the date the details the amount and then there's a total column so that we can keep adding up the total as we go down so we have an idea of where we're at throughout the month and then on the bottom there I added a little extra table for Jason's total for the month my total for the month then our combined totals that we can get a better idea of what our income is in a month because it is so sporadic and the last spread for this setup is our actual budget and the start of a spending tracker so for the spending tracker we're just going to be tracking the date the details the category it falls into so just an initial for the category and that references the categories in our budget whether or not it's a work expense so we can check off there if it is a working Spence the amount and then again a total column so we can add up the total spending as we go along and the budget so this is kind of the purpose of all of these setups is for this budget so something I've seen quite often and was reiterated in the financial diet was the idea that a budget should be split into a 50 30 2015 Thanh expenses like your rent and your internet and your phone etc 30% should be spent on your variable expenses like groceries and transportation and personal care and entertainment and then 20% should be spent on your savings so I decided to set up the budget to represent that so three separate sections for fixed expenses variable expenses and savings so for the fixed expenses I'm writing out all the ones I could think of off the top of my head and obviously these are fixed so we're just gonna write the amount that they are so moving on to the variable expenses this is where I put everything that changes month to month so groceries the cats public transport ubers laundry personal care home clothing entertainment eating out ordering in work expenses medical and other and in this section I'm gonna add two little spots for each category so we can write on the first line what we hope to spend in that category and on the second line at the end of the month we can write what we actually spent so for example groceries were thinking we should be aiming for around three hundred dollars a month for the cats food and literate cetera around two hundred dollars a month and public transport around a hundred dollars a month so at the end of the month we can add up all of our spending in those categories and put the actual amount so we can compare how far off we are and if we're spending more is it because it really just costs more than we were thinking and we need to adjust our budget accordingly and be more realistic or if we're overspending and there's a way we can cut back and then we have the last category for savings where I just wrote about all the different types of savings that we are working on and the same thing for this section there's two lines one for how much we hope to save in each category and another line for what we actually save and then the last thing that I think is going to be really interesting is that I added a little section in the bottom right hand corner of each of these little areas so that we can write the actual percentage spent in each category so at the end of the month adding it all up and seeing the total spent on fixed the total spent on variable and the total spent on savings and figure out the percentages and see if we're in line with this 50 30 20 if we're way off or if we're pretty close by I think that will be a really interesting experiment to see where we're really spending most of our money and then at the end of the month I hope to add in a little reflection page where we can go through total up our budget look at the percentages look at where we overspent where we understand get an idea of where we're at and think about what we did well what we need to work on and how we can fix things moving forward for August where I can kind of setup a new version of the spread for August and continue from there so I'm really excited for this I think this may be the first time that we're really gonna stick to a budget and that makes me excited because as much as I'm not really a big fan of budgeting or having to think about personal finances in any way whatsoever it's obviously a very important skill to develop and we are more than overdue for getting our stuff together when it comes to budgeting so I hope this can be helpful to any of you watching if you are also maybe not so awesome with money or budgeting and you're trying to think of the kinds of spreads you could make that could help you with your personal finance I hope these will inspire you to make your own budgeting spreads and to really get to know your own financial situation and make a plan to improve it as I said I would highly recommend the financial diet if you're looking for a book to help you kind of start this process like I said there will be a link in the description box if you want to get to get 30 day free audible trial so you can listen to the book for free and I would love to know please let us know in the comments what you have done that has made a big difference for you as far as budgeting and personal finance what's been a game changer for you is there a book you've read that you've loved is there a type of budgeting you've tried that's been amazing is there one spread that really completely changed your life when it comes to money please tell us in the comments down below because I think we could all use a little bit of help in this area and I know I'm excited to learn all of your tips because I'm sure you all have many awesome nuggets of wisdom to share so that's it from me today I hope you enjoyed this I hope this was a helpful video for you if you did please give it a like and subscribe to me if you're not already join the fam I want to take a quick moment to thank my patrons for their support I am eternally grateful for you special extra thanks to our newest patrons Bridget and Alison if you are interested in joining the plant-based bride patrons squad we would love to have you check out the link in the description box or in the card to come join us and get lots of awesome rewards okay that really is it from me now thank you so much for watching and I'll see you very very soon in my next video bye friends looking for something else to watch why not check out one of these two videos [Music]

Channel: Plant Based Bride

Views: 100,634

Rating: 4.9630032 out of 5

Keywords: Plant Based Bride, Bullet Journal, Bujo, Plan With Me, Art, Journal, BuJo Budget, Bullet Journal Budget, bujo budget spread, bullet journal budget spread, bullet journal budget planner, bullet journal budget tracker, bullet journal budget layout, simple budget, simple budgeting for beginners, simple budget planner, how to budget, how to budget in your bujo, how to budget money, how to budget and save money, budget, bujo budget tracker, budgeting, easy budgeting for beginners

Id: SryKnu6Ltjs

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2019