Episode 1085: Three Questions to Make Your Budget Work

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1085 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:07] Julie Tofilon: I'm Julie Tafolla. I challenge you to invest in yourself and others develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, talent, and treasures, to live out your calling. Having the ability to communicate and build relationships is vital.

[00:00:25] And one inspirational way to develop. It's to listen to this. Be inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott.

[00:00:33] Scott Maderer: but the truth is it wasn't the budgeting. That was the problem. It was that review and revise phase. That was the problem. So if you're struggling in this area, try asking yourself these three questions as you review your budget at the end of the. And see if that helps you begin to make better and smarter changes for next month's budget.

[00:00:55] Welcome, and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcasts. [00:01:00] If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your.

[00:01:17] So that you can impact the world

[00:01:21] and today's episode about investing in others through stewarding your truck. I talk with you about three key questions to ask. When you discover you spent more than you actually budgeted, I share why these questions allow you to adjust moving forward. And I also share why not asking these questions is a major reason that people actually quit budgeting.

[00:01:41] As we talk about stewarding your treasures. Wouldn't it be great. If you could support this podcast and do it without costing yourself an extra dime. It turns out you can. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via [00:02:00] Amazon and a small commission, we'll come back to support the show.

[00:02:03] If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. One of the things that comes up a lot. When people have worked with me on coming up with either a business or a personal budget and doing this ideas that we've talked about before budgeting and then review and reflect and revise and repeat the idea is what do I ask myself when I'm doing that review step?

[00:02:30] What tells me if there's something I need to adjust and what it is that I need to adjust? And the truth is that there's three questions. You can always ask yourself. And I framed this as, when you overspend on your budget, but the truth is you still want to ask these questions, even if you underspend consistently on your budget.

[00:02:51] If you're putting a thousand dollars down for groceries and you're consistently spending $1,500, or if you're putting a thousand dollars down for groceries and [00:03:00] you're consistently spending $800. You want to ask these questions so that you can look at what's going on and make a review of what's going on and then make changes that are not.

[00:03:12] So one of the questions, the first one, did I under budget or did I over budget either one of those? It's the same question. Just did I get the budget number wrong? Is it not that I misbehaved in some way, but instead I said, I'm going to spend $250 a month on food for a family of four. And that's simply an unrealistic number.

[00:03:36] Is it something that is in alignment with my values, but I simply didn't. Allocate enough money or I allocated way too much is the budget number, a good number. And the second part of that I alluded to in this question is, did I miss behave? In other words, it's not about any longer, did I just put the wrong number down on the.[00:04:00]

[00:04:00] It's now about, no, this is a reasonable amount for a family of four. This is a number that we should be able to live under. But this month, for whatever reason, we weren't able to do it. What happened in our behavior? What changed in what we did? What were we thinking? What were we feeling? What did we not do?

[00:04:21] Were we not updating our budget? As we went through the month? Did we maybe get a little off track and decide to ourselves? Now it doesn't matter. I'll just go crazy. And then you suddenly got way off track. What is it that caused you to go off track in a way around your behavior and your thoughts and your emotions?

[00:04:41] So in the first question, it's more about the math. It's just, I didn't get the number dialed in, and that often happens, especially when you first start budgeting, you have a tendency to underestimate what certain things are going to cost, but as you dial that in and begin to get it adjusted to a more realistic [00:05:00] number, then the second question begins to become more relevant.

[00:05:03] And you need to begin to think about what is it that's causing me to get off track, even though the number was a reasonable. And that brings us to the third question. Is this something that's based on a regular event or was this an unexpected or unplanned event? And let me talk about the difference here.

[00:05:22] A regular event is something that maybe doesn't happen all of the time, but. Be something that you can work into your plan. So this happens a lot to people around things like Christmas time or paying taxes or an insurance bill that comes up once a quarter. This idea of something that you really should have known was coming.

[00:05:44] It should have been built into your budget. You should have saved up the money for it, but it surprised you because you weren't yet thinking of. On the other hand, there's this idea of unexpected and unplanned events. And there is a difference between those two things, by the way, most [00:06:00] people call budget events, unexpected that in reality, many of those were actually just unplanned.

[00:06:07] The difference here is that. For instance, do you set aside money for car maintenance? People will say I didn't expect my car to break. You know what? I expect my car to break. I don't know when it's going to break, but I know that it's going to break. So it's not really an unexpected event to need car maintenance.

[00:06:27] It's simply unplanned. You didn't know when it was going to happen. So you couldn't schedule the event on the calendar. You couldn't plan. In that way, but you could plan for it in terms of saving up some money and making sure you have it available so that when your car does break, it's no longer a financial emergency and a car emergency.

[00:06:48] It's simply the car problem. And you can. Truly unexpected events or things like falling ill suddenly are someone slamming into you at the stoplight. [00:07:00] But even those, to some extent, you can still build some financial cushion to protect yourself. From some of the financial implications of those events, this is where good risk management and making sure you have the right kinds of insurance, enough insurance, making sure that you've got an emergency fund, making sure that you've done other things that have set it up well, so that when those truly unexpected events happen.

[00:07:25] You still can manage to navigate those financially becomes important. So the truth is in all three of these questions, what it does is it allows you to build your budget over time. So it becomes more and more accurate over time instead of less and less. Because what usually happens is a lot of people get started budgeting.

[00:07:46] And then what happens is things go wrong, but they don't stop them to ask themselves these three questions and figure out why did things go wrong? And therefore they aren't able to build in the fixes. And so it just [00:08:00] keeps going wrong and they get frustrated and they quit. But the truth is it wasn't the budgeting.

[00:08:05] That was the problem. It was that review and revise phase. That was the problem. So if you're struggling in this area, try asking yourself these three questions as you review your budget at the end of the month and see if that helps you begin to make better and smarter changes for next month's budget.

[00:08:24] So did I under budget? Did I misbehaved. And was this a regular event or an unexpected or unplanned type event. And what changes do I need to make in my budget in response? Thanks for listening.

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