7 Things You Can Do in 5 Minutes to Save Money in Your Budget Today | 603

0:00Who has five minutes to spare today? Ooh, Elle, if it's you, then we have the perfect opportunity for you. Seven things you can do in five minutes or less to save money in your budget today. Yeah, you're going to want to listen to this. So this episode is definitely for you. Stay tuned. Do you make good money but have nothing to show for it? Are you tired of living paycheck to paycheck? Do you have big dreams for your financial future? Do you want to get debt-free but you don't want to live on beans and rice? Or you don't want to give up those pumpkin spice lattes? If you don't already know how to budget or if you're using credit cards to get through the month.

0:35If you want to seem like you have your finances all together or you're not on the same page with your spouse when it comes to finances. We know what you're doing probably isn't working, but guess what? You're in the right place. We're Shana and Vanessa. We're best friends, business partners, and master financial coaches trained by Dave Ramsey. We've been in business since 2019, helping hundreds of amazing people like you create budgets, get out of debt, stop living paycheck to paycheck, and know exactly what to do with their money. In this podcast, we'll share with you everything we know, plus everything we're working on with our clients so that you have the best chance at reaching your financial goals.

1:10We want to help you take the guesswork out of your budget, improve your marriages, and even bring your kids in on the conversation. We can help you no matter where you're at, whether you're the single mom who's never had$500 in her savings account, or the millionaire who's paid off four real estate mortgages. And we're not going to shy away from the tough love. We'll tell you what you need to hear and encourage you at the same time. This is the Financial Coaching for Women podcast. One of the first things that when clients come to us and they ask for help with their budget, we run through a lot of steps with them.

1:43And if you have our Simplified Budget System, you have something very special. Okay. If you go into your portal, you have a bonus called the coaching action plan. And we highly suggest that you guys take a deep dive in there, print it out wherever you want to do. It is literally like having one of us in your back pocket to help you go further faster. But for those of you that need some help and need some motivation as you're on the road or maybe doing laundry or whatever today, we have seven tips right now that you can do to help you save money and help with your budget? All right. So number one, you should cancel one subscription today.

2:20And you're probably like, duh, I knew that. Do you? Because what we do when we put everything on your budget together, like when we're working with clients, they don't even know how many subscriptions they have. They're coming from everywhere. They're coming from Apple and nobody knows what Apple is. So even if you just logged in, figured out one, how to log in to Apple, because believe me, I understand that's not as easy as it sounds, and figure out what your subscriptions are in Apple, that will save you. But also Apple, PayPal, all of those different things that random things are coming out.

2:47If you just go and list your subscriptions, boy, that's going to be a bonus. But if you just cancel one, you'll save money. And you may have duplicates, guys. So go in there, figure out which one you're not using, the one you don't care about, and cancel it. Yeah, but it's not just duplicates. What I was going to say is a lot of times if you see them all on one piece of paper, it's duplicate-ish. It's duplicate-adjacent. Like you'll have three or four music or five or six streaming video stuff. We know that you know that we know that you know that we all know that you don't need them. You're not using all of them.

3:18Nobody can be using all of them. Yeah. No. And I wasn't just talking about duplicates themselves. I'm saying we've had people who have, they list out their subscriptions and they're not using half of them. We have people who've come and have two or three Netflix subscriptions. So there's so many reasons to go in, like Shayna said, and cancel a subscription today. You can find one. We guarantee to it. Yeah. And a lot of times your kids set them up and your kids don't know about it. Yeah. You don't know about it. You don't know what it is. They can pay for it themselves. They're not using it anymore.

3:43Listen, maybe they're not using Disney plus anymore. Let's go check this out and cancel one. Yep. Absolutely. Okay. Number two, turn off auto reload charges. Okay. So if you signed up for a subscription or something, maybe it's Amazon prime and it's a thing that you don't use anymore, or if it's something that you forgot, you're like, Oh, I'm going to sign up for auto charge because it's cheaper and you only really wanted one of those, go ahead and cancel. And this is particularly true. It's like Starbucks. I don't know what else autofills when you use a certain amount, but you can waste a lot of money that way.

4:14Really, you're just not being intentional with your money. So what we want you to do instead of use that is pay for it on purpose each time out of your spending account. The other problem here is all of this stuff is randomly deducting from where you pay bills. And that's what the real problem is. and you don't need sometimes Starbucks, sometimes Roblox, sometimes all of these sometimes charges happening. We're not doing that. We are buying what we want when we want it on purpose that we were cognizant of it is otherwise it's just another distraction in your bank account. I had a client who had about three to four, sometimes five Starbucks charges that would auto load right on her account.

4:48And she did not realize how often she was using it because she was using the quote unquote, the gift card, but it would auto load every time. So yeah, There's no need to do that. Like Shannon said, just attach your spending account debit card to do that. So that way you're not continuously just buying gift cards all the time. Yeah. All right. Number three, we want you to unlink your credit cards from all online platforms like PayPal, Amazon, Apple, Venmo, all that. Again, this is going to save you money because once, one, when it's hooked up to your credit cards, you don't really care what spending we want or what you're spending.

5:21We want those to be intentional on purpose that we spent money. And the other thing, a lot of times you've given access. So this is like a bonus one. Delete access for your kids. You've given them access to charge to your Apple or charge your Venmo or whatever, or hopefully not your Amazon. Listen, that's a whole nother level. I think you can have your own kid account and that could be more safe maybe. But don't give them access. Take that off. Take your credit cards off. I just had a client, we talked about this earlier, where her daughter was like used to being able to use her credit cards. We want to remove that.

5:51we want to start it doesn't mean you can't afford it whatever but if we remove that you're definitely going to spend than if you're doing it on purpose intentionally yeah and listen if your child has their debit card this is a new thing my daughter asked me the other day hey mom can i buy something from sheen and i said yeah sure go attach your debit card and she looked at me for a second and i'm saying girl it's yours and that's what you have it for and i'm not buying your stuff so it just makes them think about and it allows them to grow up and make make these adult decisions so So if your kids do have access to all this, you guys, let's not do that anymore.

6:23Yeah. And speaking of adulting, we want you to pick up the phone. And this is like really hard. So I want you to know, Vanessa, which you may not do it, but I saw a meme where I was like, you're going to pry LOL. LOL. Putting LOL at the end of your sentence from my cold, dead hands. Because my kids hate it. But millennials, we didn't have emojis, you guys. That's what I tried to tell them. We didn't have emojis, so we said LOL. Anyway, also, the young people don't like to talk on the phone, okay? I don't like to talk on the phone, but it's not a generational thing for my generation. But either way, and you usually typically don't like to call your billers either, but the adulting thing is you're going to call these people and re-quote all the things, Vanessa, they can re-quote.

7:03Yeah. So number four is to review and re-quote your phone plan, your insurance plan, your cable, your internet, all that, okay? We're bundling that into one because it literally won't take you very long to do all that, but you have to take the step. Initially, you have to pick up the phone. And I've used the chat feature before. I feel like it's not as effective as calling and speaking to them over the phone. So we do want you, especially phone, I've heard people say, oh my gosh, they came out with a different phone plan and I'm on the grandfathered internet and I'm paying more when I could be paying less and getting more.

7:34Yeah. And that, I've seen that happen with internet and other stuff too. You can, so here's the thing. When you rebundle cable, internet, all of that, you might have to threaten that you're leaving, whatever. It's fine. But the other thing to think about with cable is if you're going to cut cable, that's fine because really, none of us have that much time to watch TV, but don't replace it with a cable bill worth of, I want HBO and Paramount and Disney and Netflix and whatever, Hulu and all that. So just be cognizant of those things. The other thing with your insurance, we just talked about it on an episode, but I had a client who decided to win in and re-quoted her insurance and she, the good student discount wasn't on there anymore for her kid just fell off magically.

8:12Isn't that so nice for them? She also decided that her daughter's car, the replacement cost was or some of the replacement insurance she was paying for she didn't want because she was not going to pay to get that beater fix, I guess is what she was saying. Also loaner because there was extra vehicles in the house. She didn't need the renter's insurance and or rental for rental reimbursement or whatever. So anyway, there's just different options that you might be able to literally dive in there and quote. And that goes for the other insurances as well. This is why having an insurance broker on your side allows you to ask all those questions.

8:46And you can, and now guys, chat GPTA, there's AI. There's so many features online that can lay out what all of those terms are in your insurance. Because a lot of times we're paying stuff, we don't even know what it means. But nowadays you can look up, there's a lot of resources, figure out if that even pertains to you and what you're paying for and if you want it. Yeah. All right. So then another one is your debt. So a lot of times when we build people's budgets, they're just paying$50 here,$100 there. Extra. They just want a round number in their budget, and that's what they're paying, and they're not actually paying their minimums.

9:16And so if you're trying to create extra money in your budget, this would be something you can go back and look and actually – and then the other thing is a lot of times y 'all don't even know what your minimums are. Nope. Is that not true? They don't know. So let's figure out what our minimums are and let's set the automatic payment to be minimum only. And that will free up some cash in your budget possibly. Yeah. So if you guys set all of your minimum payments from your debt a month to the actual minimums that they gave you, that'll free up money in your budget to maybe allow you to pay off a debt.

9:46Maybe you have one that's a couple hundred dollars and you're paying a couple hundred dollars on extra randomly throughout the month on different debts. But what happens is that we're paying a little extra and then we're using it. or paying a little extra and it's a revolving door and you're not going anywhere. So the balance never changes. Or we can just pay the minimums, take all the extra, dump it on one debt and you can pay that completely off. Yeah. And going along with that, sometimes it might be worth it to you to use some of your cash to pay off a debt before it's due. So maybe you're like, okay, if I pay off this$800 cell phone debt that I have on my cell phone bill, that means I have $100 less payment every month.

10:22And then every month I cost less. And that might be something you want to do. Also, a lot of times we've had clients, Vanessa, that will just play by the rules of the creditor and just pay the 0 % loan for the rest of their life when they could just pay it off. They don't need to wait necessarily. It's like furniture loans or appliance loans. A lot of those are 0 % interest tire loans for your vehicle, different things like that. And they're like, oh, you can just pay 0 % this month, each month, this amount each month, and then it'll be paid off. Okay. Or, and usually those amounts are higher because it is 0 % and you're, you have a certain window amount of time to pay it off.

10:57So sometimes they're like four or five,$600. If you just pay that$2 ,000 debt off, you'll have$600 back in your budget. Everyone. Sometimes it doesn't matter if it's 0%. We have a lot of people that press back on us like, yeah, but that one's 0%. I'm not worried about that. I'm like, yes, but you could pay it off and get all that money in your minimum payment back in your budget and do so much more with it. So we just want you to look at it from a different angle. And that also allows you to go, go further faster because now I can really start to set up my real budget and start saving for whatever I put on debt before that furniture or whatever.

11:28I can start saving for stuff and I can't do that until my budget is like the regular budget that it's going to be. All right, budget besties, it's time for some real talk. You don't need another budget. You need a budget system. Our simplified budget system is what you've been looking for. It's going to allow you to be bougie on a budget. You'll be able to easily set up a system that runs automatically and shows you exactly where your money is going. And it's going to give you permission to spend. Everybody loves that. It's straightforward, pretty, and packed with walkthrough videos that break down the exact methods we use with our clients to get out of debt, set up a bills account, separate spending, build savings buckets, and end the paycheck to paycheck feel.

12:08If you're new to budgeting, this is the perfect way to jump in. And if you're already a budget nerd like us, you're about to meet your new obsession. This is the upgrade to your finances that you need. Right now, back to today's show. All right, number six is switch your subscriptions from monthly to annual if you can, because you can save a lot of money. Yeah, and we know this personally. Vanessa's personal mission in life is to do this. Whether it's like a supplement that you have or it's a bill, like your insurance or anything like that, you can free up the amount of cash that, one, the total amount that you pay, but also the amount of cash you have each month to mess with, which is really helpful for anybody, but especially if you have like regular income or maybe you're a teacher or something where you have lower months, to have a lower monthly footprint is always going to feel better.

12:58So your monthly bills column is going to be less and it'll increase your annual bill savings bucket. Okay. But also you're going to be saving money because a lot of times there's 20 % off, 30 % off. And this doesn't just pertain to personal. It also pertains to business. So if you have your own business, a lot of times you can save money if you switch from monthly to annual. Okay. And the last one, number seven, this is a budget besties special. I would say it's something that's unique to us. We want you to set up a kid's budget line item that is for your kids. And they're going to set a monthly budget for them instead of just saying yes to everything that comes no matter what, right?

13:34So you're going to say, whether you want to say it per kid,$50, a hundred bucks per kid, or just total my kids budget monthly of all the miscellaneous things that they constantly are asking me for is$100,$200, whatever your numbers are, whatever that is. And then that's your new budget. And it turns out because you have a budget, because you have it separated, because you're going to learn about separating your spending, then you're going to spend less because you're not saying yes every single time. The other part of that is we have people say, all my money is gone. Even the money that I designate for myself a month is gone because it ends up going to my kids.

14:04And so we don't want you to give all your money away to them all month. They're gay. We love them. They don't need all of your money. They need a certain budget. They need to be able to know that they have to live within parameters. And it is okay. And in that instance, you get to say, yes, hey, you know what? Go check your budget. Go check your amount of money that you have. And you're taking it off of you and putting that responsibility on them. And it's like you just talked about with your daughter and Sheen. How much money do you think you've saved since you started? One of our favorite lines is she says, you have a debit card.

14:34and I like to say, you have your own money. That's the most money-saving line that we've ever created. Fabulous. Yes. And again, it's not because you can't afford it. It's not because you want to say no. It's because you want to teach them decisions and financial literacy, and you have other goals possibly than Sheen to be in your budget and taking all your money. So theoretically. Yep. It's like my son last night, he said, we're going out to dinner after the baseball game. And I said, well, do you have cash in your account? Again. And he said, yes. And I said, remember, prices of gas have gone up and you need to get gas soon and blah, blah, lot.

15:04You just had prom. Don't forget about that. Just had prom and he has another one coming. It's fine. Yeah. All that. And he did all this math in his little head and thinking about it and he's, yep, I'm good. And I'm like, okay, I just want to make sure you're on top of it. Cause I know they didn't get home to 10 o 'clock last night. Sometimes it's a little helpful reminder is good, but I'm not doing that for him. It's something that he needs to monitor and track on his own. Yeah. And it's amazing when it's their money, how they become a little more decisive. They do. How machine returns happen and we're on top of to make sure they go back to the UPS store it and get so that way that credit comes back in her account.

15:34So you're just helping them. You're just learning and winning. Okay. How about some bonuses? Like those were seven, but we have a couple of bonuses. So one of the things that we want to tell you is that an option, a lot of people don't realize that you can opt out of junk mail. Praise Jesus for that. Okay. Who wants to go to their mailbox and have less junk mail? Sign me up. If you guys go to optoutprescreen.com, you can go in there. There's two different ways you can do this. You can write in a letter and sign it, and that's like lifetime. Or you can do it electronically, and I believe that's five years.

16:05So it allows you – I don't know why, but it's different. Optoutprescreen.com, you can opt out of all junk mail, so it reduces the amount of temptation you have to sign up for credit cards and all this other junk that's out there. Yeah, and this is going to be a little girl math for you, but if you saved – if you got something that was going to be$100 and you saved$20 off, you still spent$80. Okay, you still spent money. So that being said, go ahead and unsubscribe from all of the deals, all of the emails that you get consistently for stuff that may be tempting you, but that you didn't need to spend the money.

16:38If you need a new outfit, go get your new outfit. And then we're going to help you save money by not constantly being tempted by having all that email coming in. So just go unsubscribe from all of those. And then once you want to go shopping on purpose. Yeah, because nowadays all you have to do is log on to their website and all the deals are listed there. All the coupons are right there on their main website page. So you don't even need to be subscribed to their emails. Yeah. And then let's also think about just deleting social media if you want, because they engineer those ads for you and for anything that's going on in your life.

17:10Everything that you say, everything that you're talking about. Yeah. And how much you want, how to get you to spend the money right now. And then now I feel like a Sheen team, whatever their way of selling stuff has permeated everything. Right? So you go to a place and here's your code and then they'll send you emails. They won't stop leaving. They won't leave you alone again ever in your whole life because they know how to get you. And they keep giving you these offers. So just maybe delete it. It's awesome. If you're tempted, if you feel like that's a place where you're tempted a lot, then maybe just delete it and call it a day.

17:41No, I love how you said that because we have a lot of people that say, I'm so tempted by TikTok or Instagram or whatever, which I don't know. I am not that person. But some people are. So if that is you, just remove it. Get rid of it. maybe put it on your computer. So there are things if you want to go onto your computer and look at you can, but it's not tempting you every single day in your hand and your mobile device as you go about your day. All right. Those were seven different things that you could do in five minutes to hopefully save money right now in your budget and free up cash. And so we hope that they help too.

18:12If you make good money, but have nothing to show for it, this quiz will help you figure out what's really going on with your money and what your next step should be. You'll get a personalized result in a simple action step to help you feel more organized and less stressed. Go to budgetbesties.com forward slash quiz and take the free quiz today. That's budgetbesties.com forward slash quiz to find out what's really going on with your money.