00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 625 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your calling, having the ability to really find your gifts and calling is a key. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this,
00:00:26 the inspired stewardship podcast by my friend, Scott Mader, And you can automate the tracking part. You can make the tracking part something where you know, your bank app or other tools can fill in the blanks for you, but you still got to use your brain and actually review what happened and think about, is there anything here that I want to change?
00:00:54 Is there anything here that I don't feel is right and how can I make adjustments? How can I improve that situation? Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. 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.
00:01:21 We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can In today's episode about investing in others through stewarding your treasure. I talk with you about the difference between tracking and planning with your money. I share why both are important, but that they are fundamentally different things. And I give you some tips to do both quickly and efficiently as we talk about stewarding your treasures.
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00:02:18 just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. Earlier this week, we talked about tracking and planning when it comes to your time. And today I want to unpack and talk a little bit about tracking and planning when it comes to your money. You know, one of the things that I see people doing over and over again is they'll do one of these and not the other when it comes to their money.
00:02:43 And it always creates a problem. You know, there are people that will have some sort of budget set up and that's a plan, right? For your money. We, I like to call it a spending plan. And then they write that budget up. They do one of two things. They either try, create the perfect budget. That's going to just be there every single month.
00:03:03 And they never look back at it and adjust it based on the changes that happen because let's face it. November is probably going to be different than June, but because our, but they also take it and make one and then just stick it in a drawer and never actually look at it or try to live by it. In both cases, whenever somebody is making a plan,
00:03:25 but not paying attention to whether or not they follow that plan. The plan is meaningless. And similarly, what I see with a lot of folks when they come to me for help with their money is they've been tracking their money for a while. They can tell me, well, I spent this much on that and I spent this much on that and I spent this much on something else.
00:03:45 And I always look up at the end of the month. And I, I just can't believe how much I've spent on all these different things, because see, that's what they're doing. They're tracking how they spent their money, but they didn't have a plan in place in the beginning. So what happens is they look up at the end of the month and they've spent $600 on going out to eat.
00:04:03 And they're surprised by it that it seems like it's, it's something that just came out of nowhere, but the truth is it didn't, it came out of the behavior that you exhibit and tracking, looking back helps you see if you're on track, no pun intended with what's going on, but only if you have something to bounce it against. If you have a plan,
00:04:28 if you have something that you set in place ahead of time, you can't know if you hit the target in less, you have a target, you know, tracking without planning reminds me of somebody who shoots at the wall of the barn. And then after they've got all the bullets in the wall, holes in the wall, they walk over and draw a target and say,
00:04:48 see, I'm a great shot. And planning without tracking is basically like you just sit down and you plan to shoot at the target, but you never actually aim and pull the trigger and look to see how you did. And you also claim that you're a great shot because you know, you could hit the target, but you've never actually done it. So the truth is both of these tools are necessary.
00:05:17 And the interesting thing is that we also will sometimes try to automate these. We'll automate our plan. That's taking the budget and making one perfect budget that you think will work forever and ever, and ever, and sitting down and putting that out there and saying, that's the budget I'm always going to live to, instead of actually thinking about your, your money and what's going on,
00:05:39 that's the idea of planning for perfection? You know, the truth is if you don't plan and then track and then reflect on what happened and make changes to your mindset and changes to your behavior and changes to what's going on, there's no way to making progress. Automation can help you on the tracking side, but it really doesn't help you that much on the planning side.
00:06:08 Sure. There are things that you can automate the planning of, you know, if you have a mortgage or a rent payment, odds are that's the same amount every single month, no matter what it doesn't go up until, you know, if you're renting until your rent goes up or with a mortgage, it usually does it go up during the term of the mortgage though,
00:06:25 you may decide to pay more, but it's not like your mortgage increases. So there are bills. There are things that are kind of the same every single month. And sure you can put those on the plan and you know what those are, but there are other things that are going to change. You know, do you have travel coming up? Do you have a vacation?
00:06:44 Do you have a birthday? Do you have some reason that your normal behavior is going to be outside of the norm? You've got to reflect that in your plan. So doing the plan does require a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of thinking, a certain amount of paying attention to what's going on and adjusting the plan for each month. Plus with planning,
00:07:08 you have the opportunity to look ahead further. You have the opportunity to think about not just what's coming up in the immediate, but what's coming up in the longterm and plan for that. Sometimes people have what I call gotchas in their budget. They have things that, you know, maybe they only pay annually or quarterly like property taxes or insurance and these sorts of things.
00:07:30 And when those things are not planned for longterm, they sneak up on you. All of a sudden in one month you have this large payment and you've got to struggle to figure out how to do it that month. But if you look longterm with planning, you begin to be able to say in six months, I'm going to have an insurance payment. Let me start saving for it now and set aside a little bit every single month.
00:07:52 So planning helps you both in the short term and the long term tracking. Doesn't usually do that. But what tracking can do is inform the plan because after you've looked at it, you'll notice there's areas where perhaps you're overspending and you can put techniques into place to keep that in check or you'll notice for instance, those gotchas you'll see, Oh, I've,
00:08:13 I've always struggled in June because that's when my insurance payment is due. So you use tracking to inform the plan, but you don't, and you can automate the tracking part. You can make the tracking part something where, you know, your bank app or other tools can fill in the blanks for you, but you still gotta use your brain and actually review what happened and think about,
00:08:38 is there anything here that I want to change? Is there anything here that I don't feel is right? And how can I make adjustments? How can I improve that situation? And as you do that over time, what begins to happen as you begin to improve your plan, you begin to make it where H plan each month gets a little better and it gets a little easier.
00:09:04 And you can do that with a very simple spreadsheet for a plan. You can even do it with just a yellow pad and writing down what areas you want to spend. And as far as tracking, it can be as simple as looking at your bank or getting an app that automates it, like why NAB or every dollar or something like that. And then you actually have to sit down about once a week and reflect between these two things,
00:09:30 think about what's happened and what adjustments you want to make. Again, I've got a simple version of this in the tips series that I have on my website about stewardship of treasures. If you sign up for that, you'll get a sample budget form, and some tips on some of the apps that you can actually use to automate the tracking piece. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast,
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