Good morning everyone,
In the past few months with the economy in a downturn and restrictions caused by a pandemic people all over have had to watch their money. Most people are living paycheck to paycheck and can not afford to take pay reductions, furloughs, or worse being let go.
Today I want to focus on how to add security to your way of life! Today we talk about the B-word. That’s right…Budgets. Now stop rolling your eyes for a few minutes and read on. This will truly help you!
Dave Ramsey offers an amazing course called Financial Peace University that I took over a decade ago. I have applied his principals ever since taking that class. The core aspect to this training is you guessed it, the Budget! The budget is the foundational part about becoming a millionaire. Of all the people doing their debt free screams on his show and the millionaire half hours 99% run off of a budget. If you want to be wealthy in the future, you’ve got to do your budget! When interviewed the millionaires said they use a budget to make money work for them to grow their wealth.
Corporations also use budgets to make sure they do not run out of money. By using budgets, corporations are able to apply income to certain business units in order to fund develop products, marketing, employee growth, legal services, etc. The point here is that they are very intentional to make sure they are on budget to make money work for them. Successful Corporations (Banks, Amazon, Apple, etc.) make money work for them to grow their wealth. Now where did we just read that same thing….?
We cannot just fly by the seat of our pants and hope for the best. You Only Live Once (YOLO) unfortunately is not a term that works well with finances. It’s the B-word that most people make disgusted faces when said out loud that will enable you to thrive long term.
During this pandemic season, I have had to reduce my income by 20 percent, we bought my wife a new used vehicle, and my wife changed jobs with a month of no income from her. We were able to review the budget, see where we could cut costs during this season as well as move forward without getting into arguments. It was one less item to worry about during this not so fun time. In fact, we are actually looking at how we can purchase a boat as I suspect there will be people needing to sell toys to make ends meet.
Budgeting has brought my wife and I closer as we talk about our future dreams and actually budget to make it a reality as we travel along in our marriage. We even give our kids a budget for clothing and after school activities that they can manage how they choose. They just need make sure they can afford it. If they don’t have enough money, then they can’t do the activity. Now the emotion is taken out of the discussion and the focus is on simple mathematics.
If millionaires and corporations do budgets to succeed, what is keeping you from doing a budget?
Do you not have the time?
Does it seem like you don’t know where to start?
What if I had a quick excel file you could use that auto calculates and allows you to do a budget? Would that be useful to you?
If you email me today, I will send you a copy of the budget file we use so that you can get on the road for a better future. kevin@kevinsidebottom.com
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
“Businesses wonder why the majority of their sales teams struggle at winning profitable business. I teach your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate more sales with high margins!”