00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 710 of the inspired stewardship podcast. My name is. I'm a Christian financial advisor. I'm the host of the dollar savvy podcast. And I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence, impact the world by using your time, your talents and your treasures to live out your calling. Find your path to financial freedom.
00:00:28 And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to my friend, Scott Mader, the inspired stewardship podcast. So I've talked about some of the top 10 reasons that your budget doesn't work and what you can do about them, but you'll notice the common theme here, the budget. Isn't the thing that fixes your life. Your, the thing that fixes your life,
00:00:57 the budget just becomes a tool that you use to see what's going on so that you can change your life. 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.
00:01:23 We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. And today's episode about developing your influence through stewarding your treasures. I talk with you about why your budget may not be working. I shared the top 10 reasons that people manage to not stick to a budget. And I also talk with you about what you can do to start helping stick to your budget.
00:01:58 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't. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon and a small commission will come back to support the show. If you enjoy the show,
00:02:21 when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. One of those things that comes up all the time, whether I'm working with other financial coaches, when I'm working with them or training them, or whether I'm working with clients is this idea about budgets and about why we can't stick to a budget. You know, I hear people talk about budgeting as a waste of time.
00:02:47 I, I never really stick to my budget. Anyway. I just don't manage to make it work. What am I doing wrong? Or what's wrong with this? Or why should we bother doing it if it doesn't work? And the truth is, I think sometimes what happens is we're focused so much on the budget that we lose track of the fact that what we're really doing is creating a process that we can use it.
00:03:14 It's less about the budget or the tool or what app we use or anything like that than it is about the process of making a plan, thinking about the future adjusting things and seeing what happens so that we can either make an adjustment to the plan or to our behavior. The budget simply becomes a lens that we look at our behavior through. It becomes a communication tool or a discussion tool either with ourselves or with others,
00:03:44 the budget isn't magic, the budget doesn't do anything spectacular as much as it simply allows us to see and reflect on our behavior, our mindset, our goals, and our priorities in a tangible way, when it comes to our money. So let's talk. How about some of the reasons why people end up quote, not sticking to their budget? Why are they not able to do it?
00:04:11 What's going wrong? And I'm going to share what I think are the top 10 reasons and a little bit about what they are and what you can do about them. The number one reason I see people not sticking to a budget is because they're unrealistic in their approach to the budget. You know, there's five people in the family and they put down that they're going to spend $200 on food for a month.
00:04:33 That's simply not realistic. It's not a number that they can even stick to. And because they can't stick to the number, they end up going over and then they're frustrated because they feel like, well, see budgeting, doesn't work. I put down the number, I put down a plan and I simply couldn't live to it. And of course the fix for that.
00:04:52 The fix for being unrealistic is simply being realistic. You've got to look at the things and reflect reality, and then you need to either figure out a way to adjust what's going on or adjust your behavior around it. In other words, it is fine to recognize that you've been spending way too much on something. Let's say eating out. You've been spending six,
00:05:14 $700 a month for eating out and you want to make an adjustment there, but it's not okay to unrealistically say, you're going to drop your grocery, spending to a number that doesn't fit your reality. Second reason that people sometimes fall off from budgeting and make a habit of not managing to stick to it is they try to make budgeting way too complicated. They try to turn budgeting into an accounting system like they would do for your business.
00:05:44 Like you would have a bookkeeper. Do you want to do double entry bookkeeping and make a long, complicated process that uses a lot of different tools or several different accounts or other things instead looking for ways to simplify the process. The truth is if you make it way too complicated, then all of a sudden it's all about all of these tools and you lose track of the actual plan.
00:06:11 You lose track of the process. And the key here is to keep it simple. The truth is you don't have to make budgeting super duper complicated to make it productive. There are some simple techniques and tricks and things that you can do to make it work without overly complicating. It. The third thing is let's face the reality again, that sometimes your expenses are too high or your income is too low.
00:06:37 You simply have a situation where you don't have enough money to do all of the things that you either want to do, or even that you need to do. And if that's the situation you have to address both sides of the equation, you have to figure out ways to get more income coming in and you have to figure out ways to cut some of the expenses.
00:06:58 That can be the reality that you face for a period of time. The fourth reason that people don't stick to budgets is they don't spend the time that it actually takes. What I mean by that is they create their budget. At the beginning of the month, they take an hour to do that. Then they throw it in a drawer and they never do anything else with it all month long.
00:07:18 And then they look up at the end of the month and they go, well, see budgeting. Does it work? The truth is you do have to look at it. You do have to use it. You have to use it as part of the process to see what's going on. And speaking of that, the next reason is because people don't actually write it down.
00:07:36 Notice there. I said, they wrote the budget down at the beginning of the month. Well, the truth is, if you don't spend the time to write the plan, then there's no way you can stick to the plan. You're trying to carry it around in your head. And that doesn't work the six reason. And this is probably one of the most important.
00:07:53 You haven't found a reason big enough to want to make it happen. You haven't found the emotional connection to making these changes in your budget and in your money. And until you find a why that fits, it's really hard to stick to the changes that you're wanting to have happen. And it's not just getting out of debt or even saving up enough money to buy a house.
00:08:17 You have to connect to it emotionally. Why do you want to buy a house? Why do you want to get out of debt? How is this going to make you feel? What is it going to do for you emotionally as well? Number seven, sometimes the reason we don't stick to our budget is because we don't leave room for fun or for unplanned things.
00:08:38 You know, the truth is life happens, stuff comes up. The truth is we need to spend a little bit of time relaxing or having fun. And if you don't leave any room in your budget for those things, then you're going to end up busting your budget. And again, the process won't work. Now that doesn't mean you leave too much of those things in there's some balance here,
00:09:00 but over time, you want to make sure that you've left in room for fun and unplanned things. Number eight. And I've alluded to this earlier. You're focusing on the budget, the tool, not the actual process. You're not thinking about what it's telling me. Instead. You're focused on putting numbers on a piece of paper. The truth is the numbers don't do anything.
00:09:24 You are the one that makes the budget work. Number nine, you didn't budget for all of your expenses. And what I mean by that here is oftentimes we forget about things that come up periodically. We forget about the school fundraisers that happened at the beginning of the year. We forget about the insurance payment that we pay quarterly. We forget about property taxes that we pay once a year,
00:09:47 whatever it is, there's things that happen intermittently that are actually predictable. We fail to save for things like car repairs. It's predictable that your car is going to break this. Isn't a surprise, and you can work those into the budget and have those be less of a budget Buster, which then helps you stick to the system. And the 10th reason is if you didn't build an emergency fund,
00:10:13 you haven't taken the time and the effort and work through the process long enough to set aside some savings for those things that are truly emergencies. The things that are truly unpredictable, the things that happened to you through no fault and throw no control of your own. And if you haven't built some money to take care of that, then those events can become the thing that makes your budget not work.
00:10:40 So I've talked about some of the top 10 reasons that your budget doesn't work and what you can do about them, but you'll notice the common theme here, the budget. Isn't the thing that fixes your life. Your, the thing that fixes your life, the budget just becomes a tool that you use to see what's going on so that you can change your life.
00:11:03 Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively, listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of treasures, you can sign up for our treasures tips by going to inspired stewardship.com/treasures
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