Episode 975: Why Budgeting is Hard

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 975 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm

[00:00:07] Wade Galt: Wade Galt. 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 live towards.

[00:00:22] Instead of working to live is key. And one way to be inspired to do that. Listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott.

[00:00:32] Scott Maderer: the real importance is, are you willing to face yourself and your friends and your family and your spouse, and have the hard conversations and do the hard work to uncover what's really going on behind the.

[00:00:48] 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 [00:01:00] time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in. Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world

[00:01:15] And today's episode about impacting the world through stewarding your treasures. I talk with you about why budgeting is hard. I share three reasons why that's really true for most of us. And I also share what you can do with. 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.

[00:01:40] 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, we'll come back to support the show. If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. Most [00:02:00] people that I work with and most people that I know don't really like the idea of buying.

[00:02:05] They may track what they've spent, but they really don't like the idea of sitting down and planning what they're going to do in the future. It can seem like a real bore or drag because we often connect our money with punishment and reward. And so when we sit down and look at our budget, we go, I'm going to put something in here to reward myself.

[00:02:25] And then when you get to that point and you can't actually afford to buy anything, you feel like. I can't reward myself. I can't have anything I'm deprived in some way. The emotional stuff is often what makes budgeting hard. And the truth is the connection between money and emotion. Is really connected to what we achieve.

[00:02:50] We often feel like having money makes us secure and not having money makes us insecure. We often feel like if we have a good salary, if we have a nice [00:03:00] car, if we're virtue signaling out into the world that we've achieved something. That we've achieved success, but if we don't have those external things that are out there into the world, then we are a failure in some way.

[00:03:15] And this often goes back to how we were raised, what happened to us in childhood. And the truth is. Looking at a budget and thinking about where your money should go, instead of just reacting and spending, it feeds into those emotions around fear and feeling out of control and all of these other things.

[00:03:33] So often we just decide we're not going to do it. We're just not going to pay attention. We're going to ignore it because if we don't pay attention to it, then it's not real. If we just put all the bills into the drawer in the front hall and don't look at them, then we don't have to pay them, but that's not how it works.

[00:03:55] The emotional feelings you have around money have to be unpacked and [00:04:00] paid attention to because if you don't, then they're going to rear their ugly head. They're going to sneak up on you when you least expect it. And they're going to cause your mother. To not get you where you want to go because your not in control.

[00:04:16] See, the funny thing is whether it's time or money, the truth is the way we use it has more to do with us than it does to do with time or money. That's why I joke and say, I talk about time and money so that I can get to what's really important, which is. Budgeting's also hard because we just don't want to face it.

[00:04:32] We just talked about that a little bit, whatever you put it to one side and you put it off because there's always something more important. Isn't there, there's always something else. That's more important. Something else that we need to do, something else that comes up the truth is that it's easier sometimes to ignore something that's scary or painful or emotional than it is to.

[00:04:57] The truth is making no choice, not paying [00:05:00] attention to it, not actually doing the work ends up making you unable to achieve what you want to achieve, which then makes it harder to do the work. It becomes a negative cycle. So one of the reasons that setting aside a dedicated time to work on your budget, often doing it earlier in the day is so important.

[00:05:21] The third reason why budgeting is hard as more often than not a lot of times we're working with other people that may be a spouse that may be a partner that may be a boyfriend or girlfriend that may be someone that you're in a relationship with. It may even just be family around you, your brother, your sister, your mother, your father.

[00:05:44] And those other relationships affect how you see money. Maybe somebody else sees money as freedom. Somebody sees money as security. Some B person sees that the truth is if you don't live big and look fancy, you're never going to make [00:06:00] money. You have different opinions, you have different insights that come to you and therefore.

[00:06:06] Now, whenever you begin to look at the money, you hear all of those opinions played out in your head. It begins to affect what you want to do, what you can do and what you can plan to do. The truth is that money ends up being one of the biggest reasons for divorce and for fights and families. And part of the reason is because as we approach our money, we haven't actually talked about it.

[00:06:30] We haven't actually had a conversation about our history. We haven't actually had the hard conversation about why we want to do this, and what's important about it. And then began to bring those into alignment and paid attention to who is it that I trust. Who is it that I want to let into my head? Who is it that I want to let their opinion actually matter?

[00:06:52] And who is it that I can ignore? The truth is you can do a lot about this. You can [00:07:00] make budgeting and planning easier. You can make it less emotional. But the only way to do that is by dealing with the emotion, by having the hard conversations, see the truth is everyone wants budgeting to be a math problem.

[00:07:16] They want to just be a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper that somebody can tell me. If I just cut here, everything will work out. But it's never just a math problem. It feels like it should be because it's numbers on a piece of paper, but those numbers aren't numbers. They're representative of your life.

[00:07:33] They're representative of your priorities. They're representative of your values. They're representative of your relationships. They're representative of your feelings. That's what makes budgeting hard. And what you can do about it is not eliminate the feeling. Which seems like it should be the right way to go about, but instead by embracing them, by recognizing them for what they are and by working [00:08:00] through them so that you can develop a new and healthy relationship with money and with budgeting, that's the way to have success.

[00:08:08] It's why so many of my clients, it doesn't matter whether they're high net worth or low net worth, whether they have a great income or a mediocre in. That stuff is just the math part. The real importance is are you willing to face yourself and your friends and your family and your spouse, and have the hard conversations and do the hard work to uncover what's really going on behind the scenes so that you can move forward and achieve the goals that you have.

[00:08:41] Thanks for this.

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