The B Word

Unfortunately, Staying Alive costs money. A staggering amount these days. Especially as an adult, if you live out of home and have luxuries such as a car (to get to work), or a phone (to wake you up for work) or a Netflix subscription (to give you something to look forward to at work).

If you're as old as I am, then you probably feel ever so slightly stuck in between two worlds. 
On one hand you can remember a time when you could buy a singular Fantail* for 5c at the canteen, or 5 Yummy Drummies* for $2. You could've, if needs must, managed to scrape together the $5 for your lunch order by rummaging for change under the sofa cushions. 
On the other, you also experienced the fact that (at the tender age when you first held your proper big-boy retail job) it can cost you almost as much in fuel, food-court snack and parking to be at work, as working was paying you. 


This is where the B word comes in.

And no, I don't mean Bawling-Your-Eyes-Out, despite it's propensity to bring you to tears in the beginning. I mean B-U-D-G-E-T.


When it comes to easing yourself into finances, and creating a budget, I'm not who you need to be listening to. If you want a broken down, dipping one toe in after adjusting the bathwater approach to creating this bad boy, who you need is Anna Newton and her wonderful book An Edited Life**. To be fair, I think for life in general, you really should either own or at least read this book. 
Audiobook: https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details?id=AQAAAEAsxSCFHM&gl=AU&hl=en-AU&source=productsearch&utm_source=HA&utm_medium=SEM&utm_campaign=PLA&pcampaignid=MKT-DR-na-us-1000189-Med-hasem-bk-Evergreen-Nov1417-PLA-audiobookspla*AQAAAEAsxSCFHM&gclid=Cj0KCQjwjcfzBRCHARIsAO-1_OronDsDK-ZQi2AvyCY-m93fV0ry-tPNiVcu89y_U8b-JF5Yd4CsRL8aAn8SEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
Paper Version: https://www.amazon.com.au/Edited-Life-Simple-Steps-Streamlining/dp/1787132420/ref=asc_df_1787132420/?tag=googleshopdsk-22&linkCode=df0&hvadid=341744868201&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12117456488968305251&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9071913&hvtargid=pla-542461773058&psc=1


Being both a stubbornly getting the job done ASAP rocky personality despite all challenges; yet organisation-loving Virgo that I am, I blundered through the creation of mine while on a job, being constantly distracted and trying to get the bloody thing done. All the fine tuning was done over the proceeding month, as I looked at it every few days and realised I'd missed a bit of detail, or added too much in.

This is what I've ended up with***:

Looks totally overwhelming right?

Let's break it down like (you think) you do on the dancefloor after one (or five) too many shots on a Friday night.

Step #1. The first, and most important step. Your 'one foot for mankind' moment. I'm gonna need you to save all your receipts for the month before you try and attempt this. Or, if you think you can decipher your internet banking statement, pay for everything exclusively on card and remember what you actually bought when all it shows is 'Q-HILL SUPMR - $56.27', you can skip the receipts bit and just print off your statement for the last month.

Step #2. Then I made this big table, with all my expenses split into three groups. The three groups exist for two reasons. 
1) So you can make pretty pictures with all the numbers and actually SEE what's going on with your money - a definite must if you are like me and numbers tend to mix together into some sort of alpha-numerical soup
2) So you can set up the formulas you need 

Yes, I mentioned formulas, the ones you have to program in on an Excel spreadsheet, but take some deep breaths and stay with me.

Then, Step #3. You're gonna follow the Big-Table-Recipe, and make your own one of these

Here is the Big-Table-Recipe

1. Make a table on Excel or Numbers or whatever similar thing your computer came with (mine's 5 columns and 40 rows, so start somewhere around there)
2. Your columns are gonna be from left to right: Cost, Amount Per Month, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly
3. Under that, you need to make 3 Header Columns (Static, Variable, Savings) and pick a colour for each (we are going to make this into an artistic masterpiece lads)
4. Add in each cost under the heading it fits best under for you, and in the time frame you pay it.
   The cost is going to be the amount of money you expect to pay for something, or what you have room in your budget for. To start with, add in the amount you get billed each month/year for Static Costs, and what you paid last month for the Variable ones.
   Your rent will probably be the same each week, your car registration might be each year and you might buy birth control once a month. These costs stay the same, so they call go in the Static column.
   Your food bills, what clothes you buy and how much you spend at the pub on a Friday are going to change each week. These live in the Variable column.
   And yeah, as you may have realised, the dollars you're saving and paying off each month/week/paycheck are going into the Savings column. I put the debt in this column too to show me what I could be saving if I'd not decided to do a number on myself and clock up a stupid amount of TAFE certifications, and their consequent student loan debt. If you're not too sure about how much to put here, leave it blank, and we can go back to it later.
   My #1 tip with this step, is to make the Static costing more detailed than the Variable. The more detail you go into with your Static, the easier it is to change if you manage to score a better deal on your gym membership or your rent goes up. As for Variables, the more you can group these costs together, the easier it will be to see what you're spending money on each month - and *maybe* where you could cut back on.
5. On the last row in each section you're going to have a Total row. This is going to be where your formulas come in
6. You're also gunna want to have three more Total rows, one on top of the other, which will take up the last three rows of your table. They are going to be called, Total Weekly, Total Monthly, and Total Yearly.
7. Back in your Static column, calculate what you're gonna be spending per month, and enter all of these into the Amount Per Month column.
   For those who are also shit at math and would have had to Google this:
   Weekly Amount --> Monthly Amount = (Weekly Amount x 52) then divide by 12
   Yearly Amount --> Monthly Amount = Weekly Amount divided by 12
8. Eat a chocolate bar to calm yourself down. It's okay. We're all paying way too much to be alive, and the crippling realisation has hurt each of us as we experienced it. I send you a big internet hug. And I promise that if you keep following the budget recipe to the end, you're going to feel WAY more in control, and a shit tonne calmer than you do now. 
9. Use your millenial computer whiz skills to get the costs in the Static Amounts Per Month to add up automatically into the Static Total box, telling you how much you spend in bills per month.
10. Again, with the spreadsheet skills (or Youtube and crying), get the costs in the Variable Amounts Per Month column to add up into the Variable Total box
11. And you guessed it, the Savings Costs are going to go into the Savings Total 
12. Now, wave your wand and get all those Amounts Per Month Totals (Variable, Static & Savings), to add up into that one Monthly Spend box at the bottom of the table
13. Using the Monthly Spend box, you're going to get your computer to figure out how much you spent on average per week in the Weekly Spend box (amount x 12, divided by 52)
14. Also using the Monthly Spend box, you're going to get it to calcluate your Yearly Spend based on that months outgoings. You wanna make sure that your Yearly Spend is at or under what you expect you'll earn that year.
15. If your Monthly Spend is causing your Yearly Spend to go over what it should be, you're going to need to tweak the Variable Costs & Savings Costs until that number is within your means.
16. Similarly, if you didn't add in Savings Costs before, you can now see what you've got left to play with and allocate accordingly.
    Personally I have a Savings account that I call the Emergency Fund, and I put waaaaay more money into my Emergency Fund than my True Savings account. Each pay, I take off whatever extra money I've earned through allowance and overtime from my base wage, and lob all of this into my Emergency Fund before I've had a chance to realise the extra money was in there to begin with. If I end up with heaps of dollars in my Emergency Fund, I can then think about putting some of it into my True Savings. If I need a bunch of money because my pet lobster has a freak accident, and all of a sudden needs a claw surgery, I've got money saved away that I can use. This way I'm never touching my True Savings, which is really good practice for putting money into high-interest savings accounts that you can't touch or you're trying to put together something a house deposit.
17. Celebrate with more chocolate (or cry again, or both, whatever you need)

To make the pretty pictures, you're firstly going to get a pie chart going, and get it to listen to the Static Amount Per Month, Variable Amount Per Month and Savings Amount Per Month. This is gonna help you see how your money is being split. There are some ideas about what this breakdown should be, but in reality it will be different for everyone, and I usually just look at it to see how much I've managed to save vs spend that month. The bigger the savings %, the happier I'll be.

As I am a visual creature, I also made a chart which listened to each cost box individually on one axis, and the highest dollar amount in any of those cost boxes on the other. It's good to see how your money is actually broken down, but I take no responsibility for how scarily big your rent column will be compared to your food column. It's a sad reality for me, despite how many avocados I eat.

Then, you're going to name this Sheet (the page that your table and graphs live on) the Master Copy. After that, you're going to duplicate it 12 times, and each Sheet is going to be named after a month. Leave the Master Copy as is, and delete the Per Month amounts in the Variable and Savings sections. These you're gonna fill in each month, from either your reciepts or online banking statement.

It's really important that you leave the Master Copy with all the costs and totals in it, so that each month you can compare your Monthly Budget Sheet against it, and see where you're going.


Congratulations, you officially have a budget, and gee I'm proud of you!!!

Now all you have to do is fill it out at the end of each month, change the costs as you see fit (or your landlord does vis-a-vis the rent situation), and compare each month to the next with some Hunger-Games type competition to try and squeeze the absolute most out of your pennies (or cents, whatever). 


Things to remember:

• Shit in your life will change, just make sure your budget changes with it, so that you are living within your means and not creating a big pit of doom and despair (aka an aggressive amount of credit card debt)
• Some months you will go over, some months you'll be under budget - and that is OKAY. That's the exact reason you're doing this all in the first place is so you can financially have your own back (emergency fund) if you need to
• I personally like to take out my amount for food each week in cash money. This is where I tend to mess up the most and overspend, but having it actually dwindle into random 5c and 10c pieces in the coin compartment of my wallet helps me calm the fuck down and not buy 10 cartons of almond milk in one go. I'd recommend taking out cash for variable amounts that you know you have a tendency to spend more than you've budgeted for; or if you like to shop online, you could put this money onto a different card or account so it's separated
• Try to live below your means, or at least not let lifestyle inflation kick in. Here's a really good video that explains what that is and how it will bite you in the ass
  (around the 12 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VWn8PPfs_w 
  plus bonus video about how she paid off her debt *super inspiring* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8JjqrVcv6s
• Check in with your suppliers every year, or six months. I once had a phone plan that cost me $150 a month. I didn't think to see if I could change plans for three years, so I paid an absolute fortune for my phone (this was a Sim only plan too, just to make matters worse). After reading An Edited Life I went to my provider and realised I could switch to a plan that would cost less than $60 a month. The new plan is unlimited too, and so now I don't go over my data and no longer need to pay for Wifi. I once paid $250 for excess data charges. That's $400 for a month of phone use. I've since saved about $1200 in phone bills this past year. That is A LOT of money. So I'll say it again for the people in the back, with their ears shut - CHECK YOUR SHIT!!!!

All in all, I reckon making a budget is one of the most important things I've done in my 20's. It's given me a benchmark, and made me feel like I could actually get somewhere one day. It's also helped me reign in some of my spending habits *cough* going to Salvos to buy bougie second hand dresses I never wore *cough*, by helping me see that those small purchases were actually doing real damage to where I wanted to be in the long run. 

I really hope that you've taken something away from all this, even if it is just a migraine.

Lots of love,
Loz xx



* I apologies if you're not in your mid-late twenties or early thirties, or hail from somewhere other than Australia. A Fantail is a chunk of caramel (of the particular viscosity best known for ripping out any tooth with the slightest bit of wiggle) in a thin layer of chocolate, and a Yummy Drummie is a flat, soggy and salty but COMPLETELY DELICIOUS chicken nugget which was shaped somewhere between a toddlers best effort at drawing a fish and a 2D chicken drumstick. Fantails still exist in packet form and are best consumed on the couch while drinking tea and binge watching something really crap. I've not seen a Yummy Drummie in over a decade, and therefore fear that these majestic creatures may be extinct.

** I honestly didn't even realise how much I'd taken away from this book, especially during the budgeting section. I wrote my budget with no direct reference to it, as I'd lent the book to my Mum who subsequently hogged it for six months. It was only when I re-read it a year later that I realised I'd taken Annas advice nearly word for word. My budgeting is really only a personalised version of what she suggests, hence why I strongly suggest you read An Edited Life. Total game-changer, and written with all the wit, humour and well-placed sarcasm your funniest best friend has while she's helping you ponder life problems, aided and abetted by a glass of red

***All the numbers in this budget are made up. If you find me someone who lives in a flat alone in a first-world country and pays only $100p/w in rent, I will show you either a liar or someone who has really lovely parents.