AAR35 - Fluctuations in Income: How to Adapt

23:13Andrew Sather:I got a general idea of what I spend and what I make or whatever. That's not going to let you make actually precise decisions with your finances. If you have everything written down, then you know, okay, I'm going to pay every bill that comes in and then I have maybe 200 bucks to go spend on something. And that's a hard number in this case. And as long as I stay below that, I'm going to be okay. That is a huge, huge, huge step to take in a negative situation like this.

23:39Evan Raidt:Let me ask you, how long realistically do you think it would take somebody to fill that out for the first time?

23:46Andrew Sather:I would say if you're starting with no budget whatsoever, maybe we give it like 30 minutes or something like that because really what the process would look like, and then I have an episode actually going through my personal budget describing of how all those items got there and you could kind of just follow along and do it yourself as well. But for me, it would be frankly just going from app to app, you know, saying, okay, how much do we spend on the mortgage exactly? How much do we spend on water and electricity and car insurance and car payment? Just go app to app to find all these needs and where they total up.

24:19Andrew Sather:And then savings, or sorry, and then wants, I think it's a good idea just to go back through your bank account or your credit cards or something like that and kind of get an all encompassing idea of how much you generally have spent on your wants and what it has generally been on. If it's on anything recurring or regular, you know, if you always get massages every month and they cost a set amount, well, that gives you a good, a really solid idea of how much that section of your wants is. And then if you are currently saving anything, again, it's kind of going app to app going, you know, open Fidelity, open Robinhood, open Schwab, and then you can see where all your savings are going.

24:53Andrew Sather:So I would say maybe a 30 to maybe 45-minute endeavor to just go area to area and plug all that in.

25:02Evan Raidt:Maybe the high, and I'm not being, I don't think I'm overstating it by saying maybe the highest ROI 30 minutes you could save or you could spend in your entire life if you just go from no budget to a budget.

25:19Andrew Sather:yeah that's you would you would be amazed no matter how much willpower you think you think you have like me for example i think that i have decent willpower but a lot of people most people probably think that they have good willpower and when you just have money floating around and there's no definition to it and you're kind of saving when you're able to you're paying the bills as they come in but you're not really sure of their exact amount but you have an idea of what they usually are or whatever. Trust me, you do not have nearly as good of an idea about the situation as you think you do. When I first did a budget, thankfully, I saw good numbers in front of me in the end.

25:54Andrew Sather:I didn't see something negative or anything like that. But when I first did a budget, it was so eye-opening to sort of see the whole flow of where the money goes usually. Even though it's happening every single month, every single day, every single week, you still just don't have a really good idea of what it is until you write it down in hard numbers and you can see okay that is you know maybe within 50 or 100 that is exactly how much i'm going to have left over that is exactly how much i've been saving that's how much i've been spending on coffee like you see all these numbers add up and um it's a very eye-opening financial experience and like you said easily the highest ROI thing you can do to put 30 minutes in and suddenly be able to plan your financial future, plan for downturns, plan for upturns, increases, that's a massive turnaround and pivot point.

26:50Evan Raidt:That's highly encouraging that even you, even the great Evan Wright, of any rate, has realized that he needs a budget too.

26:59Andrew Sather:yeah it was it felt silly to not have one before then but then again it is it is 30 to 45 minutes and there are a lot of 30 to 45 minutes things i should be stretching more i'll tell you right now i should be stretching more that what does that take 10 minutes maybe or something like that and yet it's so dang hard to do for no reason there are a lot of of of low low time investment things out there that are that have a very high return are completely worth doing and if you don't get yourself in the habit of doing it and have the mindset of you being a person that does it because now i see myself as a person who budgets but when i didn't see myself as a person who budgets i'm never going to go budget that's just too much time for somebody who doesn't budget to go budget and so it takes a pivot point but once you do it the first time as well not to mention 34 or 5 minutes up front but the first time you do it you drastically reduce the friction of doing in the future because for example you know i've gotten a raise since then or something i can take my raise I can say okay I'm willing to spend some of it here and the rest I'm going to go put it I'm going to decide to go put that in my Roth IRA so let me just open my Roth IRA app after I put that on my spreadsheet increase the deposit by that amount and boom there we go the raise has been handled and planned for and everything else is still where it was and that is that is something you just don't get if you don't have that plan ahead of time absolutely and the last thing I want to cover on decreases before we move on is try not to just freeze everything it's very easy to see an income decrease feel very trapped and just say okay i need to cut cold turkey you know it's like we're trying to stop smoking or something like that trying to quit cold turkey and stop everything at once is not going to be realistic and sustainable and it's in my experience for a lot of people around me it will just lead to either splurging because you swing so hard in other direction that you say okay well that that holding back and cutting cold turkey was way too much i just need to spend to get past this and you don't even realize you're doing it necessarily or it's just going to lead to genuine depression of feeling very stuck in that situation not being able to spend anything holding back on absolutely everything you would want to buy just because you have to or at least feel like you have to and what i mean by feel like you have to is if you don't have a budget that's outlining it telling you you can't spend anything then there's a good chance that you could spend stuff if you had everything in your budget laid out and knew where everything was going.

29:25Andrew Sather:But again, if you lay out your budget and it does lead you to you can't spend anything, then I would say that that is probably not sustainable and that is a situation that you need to get out of in one way or another. Easier said than done for sure, but we're not here to discuss job hunting because that's just something that I wouldn't feel like I would have enough expertise on. but that would be one of the next steps to take to get you out of that situation

29:52Evan Raidt:yeah if you're out there and you're an expert reach out maybe maybe we might have you on the

29:56Andrew Sather:show that would be a really good episode number three moving on is say you have some kind of income fluctuation could be up could be down we've discussed both of those but you're you're going through it in a relationship this is i mean money is it's definitely the leading cause of divorce. I don't remember what the percentage is. I think it's like 60 or 70%, but most divorces occur and relationships break up in general, at least adult relationships. I doubt 15-year-olds are likely arguing about money, but anything past that, it's definitely going to be due to money, and that causes a lot of relational hardship.

30:31Andrew Sather:One of the first steps here is to not treat one person's changes as the trajectory for a couple. Again, this relates whether it's both up or down. If your income is increasing, if one person's income is increasing, it's easy to see both of your situations as the same. And therefore you're both, you know, going up like crazy. You both have so much more money to spend money. Money's just flying around, blah, blah, blah. And if you don't do a budget together to realize where you stand as a whole, then you're just guessing based on that. And it's very easy to get caught up in lifestyle creep and your partner understand, say you're the one earning more money and your partner understandably wants to spend a little bit more because they feel like you as a couple has more money.

31:13Andrew Sather:If they don't communicate with you ahead of time or you don't communicate with them ahead of time to know how much the change is and what kind of tangible impacts it actually has, they could assume they could go about spending more money than they could. And then now you're putting yourself in, as we talked about before, an even worse situation than you started in just because they assumed that the the trajectory upwards was so much more than it was. And of course this applies. If, if one person's income is going down, I would, I would focus a lot more on supporting the person who's going down at the moment instead of, and seeing it as supporting that person instead of seeing it as, okay, us as a couple are now going down because then that's going to lead to a lot of resentment.

31:56Andrew Sather:It's going to lead to potentially lead to a lot of dependency, depending on which ways things flip. It's a lot of relational, interpersonal issues that can occur if you don't properly communicate and handle this ahead of time so that also leads to setting up a minimum viable budget like i discussed before as a good reference point as a couple so taking both of all of both of your expenses and spending and and into account make a minimum viable budget and you know when stuff hits the fan for you as a couple instead of just assuming that one person going down is enough for that always seen that

32:29Evan Raidt:Spider-Man meme?

32:31Andrew Sather:Sorry. Everybody's pointing at each other?

32:33Evan Raidt:Yeah. I imagine a couple just doing that.

32:39Andrew Sather:It's just not productive. Instead, they should both be pointing at a spreadsheet. They should be pointing at a spreadsheet, which I actually forgot to point out the link. But it's einvestingforbeginners.com slash budget. That's where you can head over to if you want a good budgeting framework to get you started. It's not the most complex thing in the world, but in a lot of ways that's a good thing because we're trying to lower the barrier of entry for you to have a budget. If you want to make it much more complicated, there are definitely some great paid services out there, some great paid spreadsheets as well available online that can give you a much more complex daily tracking of your income or something.

33:13Andrew Sather:But we just want you to have some decent reference numbers to get us to start with. And then another thing to mention about finances and relationships that I feel very strongly about, and I know I've talked about before, is proportional contributions. I personally find it very, very silly when two people are in a relationship, they earn very different amounts of money and they contribute the same amount to rent. That just doesn't clock for me personally or how I view relationships. I view relationships as supporting one another and you don't know when maybe the person earning more is suddenly going to be making double what the person who's making more, was making more previously, is making.

33:51Andrew Sather:And now you wouldn't want to be doing that either. it's just if you sign up for a relationship to somebody where you're going to be sharing your finances in some way if you're living separately you just met you know on tinder or something we're not discussing that but if you're in a committed relationship where you're living together you have shared expenses you have a home together kids together you're interlinked in some way if you're not willing to support that other person and proportionally you know if you earn twice what the other person earns then start paying two-thirds of the expenses and they pay one-third of the expenses that will allow them to live a much more fruitful life and it will allow you to help them and be of service to them and support them when they need it that that's a much more symbiotic way to view finances and relationships than just assuming well you're living in half the house so you better keep up your half of the house and pay for your half of the house because that can that can turn people into put them down a hole of of of resentment towards the person and a hole of financial insecurity because now they might be living above their means when for you you're living right at your means and this seems easy for you um but creating everything proportionally hope that makes sense just allows you to allows both people to be on a level playing field for their own situations and always communicate openly with figures with precise numbers at any point whether your income expenses blah blah blah as soon as you're aware so that both people are aware of any changes that might be occurring.

35:21Evan Raidt:How do you guys handle that conversation?

35:27Andrew Sather:Conversations, yeah, it's going to be more and more conversations. But whenever income changes for either of us, up or down, we have a budgeting template that we do as a couple. Again, very simple, exactly like the budgeting outline we offer online. Just a good way to see everything in one place. because if I say, oh, you know, my budget, okay, I'm saving, so I'm in a good place. And then if my wife says, oh, well, my income has decreased, I'm not going to be able to save as much or whatever. If we're not communicating any numbers, then this decrease, it could be 50 bucks a month. And it sucks, but it doesn't really make that much of a difference.

36:05Andrew Sather:Or it could be$500 a month, in which case, the amount that each of us is able to put towards the mortgage is significantly shifted. And so, again, to keep it proportional, there's going to need to be some shifting that happens. And if precise figures aren't given, then we just can't make those adjustments. So whenever, as soon as either of us know it's about a change that's going to be occurring, we have a conversation about it. If it's going up, then we have the emotions of joy about it. If it's going down, then we have the sadness about it. But then within a very short period of time, that same day, we quickly sit down or at least communicate the figures to one of us so that the other person can go to the spreadsheet, quickly shift the income figure, take a look and see, okay, are we still going to be okay?

36:49Andrew Sather:Okay, well, we'll just save a little bit less here. Again, it's as quick as going into an app and adjusting that savings a little bit and boom, boom, you're done. Of course, it would be a more difficult, complicated situation if that was taking us to the point that we couldn't save anymore, but it would be more difficult emotionally. But in terms of budgeting, just to look at it analytically, it wouldn't be that much harder because again, income decreases. Okay, we're going to have to save less or we're going to have to spend less it's as easy as going to that spreadsheet adjusting those numbers if you have some kind of financial automation going going to those apps and adjusting whatever is automatically occurring in the back end and now you've dealt with the situation and you can move on and say well that sucks but we dealt with it and we're going to be okay that's that's the best thing you can say getting out of is we're going to be okay

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38:53Evan Raidt:ourselves a car. See? So many cars. That's a clicktastic inventory. And check out the financing options. Payments to fit our budget. I mean, that's... Clickonomics 101. Delivery to our door. Just a hop, skip, and a click away. And bought. No better feeling than when everything just clicks. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. I don't want to sit on this too long, but I think it might be important. And it sounds like you guys are very open and communicative with your finances just in general. Did that take a while to build up into? And if so, how did you build up into that?

39:37Andrew Sather:That's a really good question. It definitely did take a while. I think a big part of that for us specifically is we've been together since we were 15. And so we practically grew up together in a lot of ways, at least going from adolescence to adulthood. and when you're an adolescent when you're a teenager it's taboo to talk about finances partially because they're not your finances they're your parents finances anything you would discuss and so there's no real upside or reason to say oh you know we earned this much i mean kids probably don't even know how much their parents are earning to any even imprecise dollar figure and so going from that to being an adult where suddenly you are earning hard numbers that land in your hard checking account that gets spent on hard bills, like everything is very precise,

40:27Andrew Sather:that transition is very, very different. And it's definitely not an automatic mental shift. At least it wasn't for us an automatic mental shift to go from not discussing finances at all because they don't even really involve us in a lot of ways to discussing things in precise numbers. That was not an immediate flip. So it became more. We went to college. We started earning each of our own income through working at the student union. We both did work at the student union. Actually, I worked at Academy Sports and Outdoors before that, which now that I say it out loud is a very southern place to work, I feel like.

40:59Andrew Sather:At least it comes across that way to me. But yeah, once we both started earning some money, again, initially we did not discuss money. We would discuss maybe how much we were earning, but anything past that was not really being discussed. so we probably didn't discuss finances with each other until we were living together we lived at an off-campus dorm and so we were actually splitting rent that definitely led us to a point of okay well as long as let's make sure that we're each earning enough to afford this and we kind of already have an idea of what each other earns but let's sit down communicate that to some degree and i also i also want to clarify when i say that we sit down and do something i think that that That also makes it feel like some high barrier.

41:43Andrew Sather:Okay, we both need to sit down. We need to get a desk that's wide enough for both of us. We need to get two chairs. We need to get two yellow legal notepads. Both people dress up. This is a business casual event. What I mean by this is, I mean, it could be in the car. It could be in bed. It could be while you're eating dinner, while you're cooking dinner. There's a lot of situations where you could, quote unquote, sit down and discuss something very openly and say, well, I actually earn this much and, you know, I've been putting this much into my Roth IRA or I've been spending this much on, you know, coffee beans, whatever.

42:17Andrew Sather:Coffee always comes to mind for me.

42:22Andrew Sather:But yeah, for us, it wasn't until we started sharing our finances that we had those kinds of open conversations. And then it wasn't until after that, I think, when we wanted to move or we graduated college and so we needed to move to somewhere completely separate from college. so we're going to be earning some kind of full-time income, paying some full rent, and blah, blah, blah. Everything's going to be the real world with no net beneath us or anything like that. That was a big transition to say, okay, we need to write down how much we're actually going to be earning. This is going to cost this much.

42:54Andrew Sather:Okay, we can afford that. How much do we usually spend on this, blah, blah, blah. And that was probably when the framework of sharing our finances with each other as a couple started growing because that's when it needed to grow. Because if it didn't, then we would not have been able to afford where we lived because we wouldn't have known what we could afford and we probably would have made the wrong decision. We would have spent money in places that we didn't mean to.

43:18Evan Raidt:Yeah. Something I really like about your guys' story and you talk about even from the beginning when you were splitting rent, even though it was like a split, like I got this side, you got that side. It wasn't like, okay, we're doing it like that and then no communication. like they're not mutually exclusive things where okay i got it covered you got it covered so we don't need to communicate anymore there's still the communication even though i got this side you got that side and i think there's a lot of power to that and it's showing i mean the truth is going to come out eventually so might as well have it come out in a healthy way rather than down the

43:56Andrew Sather:line where somebody's really upset one one million percent and and i don't know when we actually I do know we with proportional contributions this is going to be a very open story so we are going to linger on this bullet point whether you want to do or not but I specifically remember I think I might have mentioned this story before as well there was a point where when we were going to leave we graduated college so we're going to have to you know go get an apartment elsewhere we're going to move to here in Daytona Beach and we had an apartment in mind that we wanted to get and it was predicted that I was going to be earning more at that point than she was going to be earning.

44:34Andrew Sather:And I had the initial assumption of, okay, cool, so you'll cover half and I'll cover half and boom, we're good. And she, in a big moment, at least I believe in her mind, I'm not going to assume that without her to counter it. But in my mind, I think that it was a very big moment of bravery of her to say, hey, actually, I don't think I'm going to be able to afford that. and can we instead maybe do like 60-40 or 70-30 or I think we landed on 65-35 or something like that she was open enough to say hey could we actually shift it this direction and I definitely had the initial reaction of not getting angry or anything but being like that doesn't seem fair because it doesn't seem fair that's the initial reaction and then within maybe like 20 seconds or something it was like oh oh no that that makes sense and that's fair and so i guess i should credit this all to jen coming up with it initially but um it was very easy to have that fight or flight initially of like well hold on i'm earning more i want to i want to have more money to spend and then you realize okay if you pay a little bit more you support her or support whoever your partner is but you're still going to have more money than than they are you're still going to have more to spend than they are.

45:48Andrew Sather:So you might take a little bit of a hit, but it's going to make a bigger difference to them and be a bigger help to them than it is going to be a hindrance to you. That's a fantastic point. Yeah, that was a massive, massive mindset shift for us. And I think that put us on a really good trajectory to never have any of that financial resentment or lack of communication or anything like that. And to get that proportional figure, of course, you need to sit down and figure out how much exactly each person is earning and so kind of inherently with doing proportional spending you're going to get a good idea or a very precise idea of what each person spends and then you're only a couple steps away from discussing how much each person spends and earns and potentially saves at that point if they're saving anything specifically but yeah that was that was probably the point when when that all started yeah love that thanks for sharing yeah absolutely absolutely all right so So move on to number four here, how to budget for fluctuating income.

46:49Andrew Sather:So you know that your income is going to be changing and fluctuating. How do we go about budgeting for that and preparing for that? The first statement is it's not going to be the same as a static budget or income. So sadly, the budget outline that we have online, it will get you a lot of the way there. But you can't simply fill that out and say you're done. like you could, sadly, as somebody who had static income that they could predict on a monthly basis. This will lead you to either having incorrect numbers in there and relying on incorrect numbers and spending on incorrect numbers or to constantly rewriting it.

47:25Andrew Sather:If your income is going to be fluctuating every paycheck or something, you would be in there trying to re-estimate this every single month. And at that point, I guarantee you that's going to be too much friction for you to do and it's not going to be sustainable to keep up with. so the first step for me would be to still fill out that budgeting outline but fill it out on your lowest reliable income now that may not be a hard number that you know you know you may not have a floor to how much you could earn exactly some people out there for example sales people do often get a low salary and then the commission makes up all the rest of their income so for some people like in a sales position they might have a specific number for that but even if you don't look back your history of income and how it's fluctuating kind of get an idea of okay where's the lowest that I could possibly hit?

48:11Andrew Sather:And let's make sure we can live off of this, budget off of that. And I would say full budget and not just budget your minimum viable income or how much you could just buy off of and pay your needs off of, but pay your needs, also have some wants and potentially also have some savings being put away. Get a whole encompassing idea of what your life and your finances would look like at that minimum that lowest reliable income that you can depend on. Because if you can't make that happen, so you can't live off of that lowest reliable income, your only other options are obviously change jobs or you need to have a really beefy emergency fund behind you or side income.

48:53Andrew Sather:An emergency fund could be there where if it goes too low one month, lower than you expected or as low as you expected but you knew you couldn't survive off of it, you need to have an emergency fund to very quickly take that money, rip it out and pay your bills with it or something like that. Or you can get side income just to supplement you enough so that you can keep afloat during those low months, and then it'll just be additional money the rest of the year. One idea here, kind of aside from emergency fund, we discuss emergency funds a lot because for most people, their income is rather static, and so it's important to have money to prepare for the unexpected.

49:29Andrew Sather:but if you're in a situation where your income is constantly fluctuating a lot and you know it's going to be it's good to have a buffer separate from emergency fund and again the emergency fund is still there for sudden unplanned expenses but ideally the buffer is there to cover you during low months and then during any up months you prioritize supplementing back into that buffer so maybe you know for me i use sofi and bank of america or something so maybe you have a a separate bucket or vault in your high yield savings account or a separate savings account at your bank or a separate checking account, some accessible amount of money in an account at one of your banks that you put money into as a buffer, maybe leave, you know, a couple grand or something, just making up a number here, leave a couple grand in there and then leave a couple grand in the emergency fund.

50:17Andrew Sather:Then on a low month, the first thing you do is tap into that buffer to make sure you stay afloat and you never touch your emergency fund. and then the next month you're up and you supplement back into that buffer fund until it's back up to a couple grand and now you're back where you reset. All the while you still had money available that if your car breaks down and you need to get it repaired, you can pull from the emergency fund and know that you're not putting yourself at risk of not being able to get by next month because you still have that buffer. So even though it's really just moving money around and separating them sort of intangibly to some degree because you could spend it all at once realistically, it's a really good mental barrier to say, oh, well, I can't spend past this because I already bucketed that up separately.

51:02Andrew Sather:And that's a fantastic way to do it so that you protect yourself. And then the last thing I'll say is that any extra income, so on up months or something, goes into predetermined buckets. Again, first step should be refill up that buffer. Very, very first thing. Anything past that, have some buckets set aside so that you know, okay, if I have$300 additional that month, that's going to go in my Roth IRA. And then if I have even more than that, then that'll go in my 401k. And anything past that, I'll go in my high-yield savings. So you have an idea of where the money will all go. The only downside here is that you can't easily automate something like that because usually automation is put a set number or a set percentage every single month that happens.

51:43Andrew Sather:You can't do like if statements to say, well, if it's below this amount, then do this. so it will require a little bit of manual effort but if you have the budget there ahead of time it's very easy at the end of the month to say okay i earned this much this month so some of it goes to this bucket some of it goes to this bucket some of it goes to this bucket boom move on maybe maybe a five minute endeavor to do something like that every month as long as you have the budget set up ahead of time and you know what those buckets are yeah uh nothing to

52:13Evan Raidt:add there. I think it's kind of will be tough and doesn't sound fun, but having fluctuating income is not fun. But it can be really fun if you just plan for it and put the right steps in. So I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. And I think you'll be glad you did the extra work if you're in that situation.

52:35Andrew Sather:100%. Yeah. Taking some of these steps turns fluctuating income from a danger that threatens to not allow you to survive during down months and flips it to something that every time you whatever number you see come in could be really up could be really down you know how to deal with it you know how you're going to deal with it you know whether it's a survival survival amount of money and you know if you have any extra you know where you're going to put it that makes it very very easy to deal with as it comes in it's definitely still a very frustrating lifestyle to put up with over time. But as long as you have the buckets and the budget and everything behind you and the mindset of using that budget behind you, then you'll be able to flow with the punches as they come in and you know you'll be able to get by.

53:24Andrew Sather:So to kind of sum up this whole episode as a whole, income changes, that is okay. Income changes for a lot of people out there in a lot of different industries and a lot of different fields. and those people still need to be able to have a successful fruitful financial future and a lot of these steps that we discussed today will get you there it's just important to build up systems that will allow you to adapt instead of trying to adopt rigid systems like a line for line budget or something like that that seem great on paper but the second stuff hits the fan and things change no longer that's no longer applicable and now you could be putting yourself upside down without even realizing so we just need to build systems that that are flexible and will allow you to adapt but i'd love to hear uh feel free to email me over at evan at investingforbeginners.com or leave a comment below and let me know have you ever dealt with income fluctuations have any of your loved ones ever dealt with income fluctuations and how did you get through it and maybe what are some some tips or or mindsets that you used to successfully come out on the other side or just build a life around that fluctuating income.

54:31Andrew Sather:But as always, remember, financial freedom is built one smart move at a time. Keep it simple, keep it steady. And at any rate, I'll see you next time. Peace. The information contained is for general information and educational purposes only. It is not intended for a substitute for legal, commercial, and or financial advice from

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