How to Build a Budget You Can Stick to Long Term

0:00In today's episode, we're talking about how to create a budget and stick to it. If you've ever given up on budgeting because it never goes as planned, this one's for you. I'm sharing three powerful mindset shifts and practical steps that will help you build flexibility, freedom, i.e. freedom into your budget so you can stay consistent and confident no matter your budget results. Welcome to the Wealthy After 40 podcast, the show for Gen X women and couples who are ready to ditch financial stress and feel confident about retirement. I'm your host, Dalene Higgins, financial and retirement coach, helping Gen Xers master their money and create a personalized retirement plan so they can stop spinning their wheels and step boldly into their dream retirement.

0:52If you're feeling behind, don't worry. Continue listening to this podcast, as well as be sure to grab your free guide, Five Must Do Steps to Start Retirement Planning Now. at elevatefinances.us backslash must do. And remember, let's make retirement possible together.

1:14Welcome to the episode. I'm excited to talk about this as I know everyone really struggles with budgeting in many capacities, but it's always about, ah, well, I overspent or it didn't work exactly like I had it down. And so I just gave up. Let me ask you, do you really expect your budget to be created because you have a crystal ball? I don't know anybody that has that and that can expect everything to go as planned because we know life is lifing. If we haven't figured that out by this age, I don't know what else we need to figure out. But what if the real goal of budgeting isn't perfection, but knowing how to adjust and flex your budget without shame or guilt.

2:06That's really what we want to get rid of. That guilt, that shame, I can't figure this out. It's really, really hard. And I understand that. But once you figure it out, there is so much power in budgeting. So much power. I'm glad you're here. I'm excited to dive into and share specifics about this. First thing, budgets are a plan, not an exact, not a prediction. Like I said, nobody has a crystal ball that will tell you exactly what the next 30 days will bring. It just is not possible. But your plan for your money is a necessity. The plan for your money, the main purpose is so that you don't overspend overall.

3:02I'm going to talk about overspending, but in a different way. But a budget plan is also essential to help guide your money into helping you reach your goals. You want to reach retirement? You You got to start with a budget. Where do you start with? Well, then how am I supposed to make a budget plan if I don't know how things are going to happen? Well, I want you to start thinking about the budget more as a guide, as a framework. That it's there to tell you, you haven't overspent your monthly income. It's, you've got to plan that way. This is what I would love to happen. This is what I hope happens.

3:49In some months, it does. The problem is when you are first budgeting, there is a lot of unknowns, a lot of unknowns. As we dive into point three is where we're going to talk about that. But I really want you at this point to know that budgets are just a plan. They're your framework. They're your guide. heck even after 18 years of religiously budgeting i'm not counting any other attempts i made i'm talking about when i got serious 18 years ago and every month it doesn't go as planned it doesn't go as planned there's always something happening and you know it's really hard to say well this is just going to set me off.

4:39So I've just got to give up. That's what I don't want you to do. I don't want you to keep doing that. I want you to listen to this episode and figure out how you're going to stop that. All right. The second point, flexibility with your budget is key to its longevity. Key to your longevity and staying with the budgeting. If your budget doesn't allow for real life, you're going to feel restricted. You're going to feel like a budget is keeping you in a box. And right there, you're going to give up. You're going to lead to burnout. If you are keeping yourself held to every category you've got spelled out, you're like, I can only spend this much here, so I can't do anything more.

5:31What if you have some in the other category that could help you feel like you have freedom. Flexible budgets lead to sustainability. That helps us keep going. When you expect your budget to be perfect, any surprise, any offset is going to have you feeling like you failed. You've been there, done it. I know you have. Most of my clients have. At any point, most of them have budgeted. When I talk to people about budgeting, they're like, yeah, I did a plan. And by the middle of the month, I was just completely off. We've got to be better. We've got to be better about how we budget, but also how we think about budget.

6:20Think of your budget as all of the categories having a give and take relationship. If one category goes up, another might go down. We learn how to flex to be able to cover those real life scenarios, those real life things that are happening. And then don't start expecting every category to be exactly the same every month. It just is never going to happen. We get better, we get closer. Most of the time life goes as we expect, but there are several times during the year where it just does not. If you are like, well, I need my categories to be exactly this way and you have several of them, let's say you have 10, 15 of them, I would suggest you grouping them together, making them bigger, this is going to give you more flex.

7:26It's going to give you the ability to kind of have everybody helping out, but still staying within not overspending your monthly income so that you can still reach your goals. If budgeting feels more frustrating to you right now than freeing, than the freedom of spending, you feel like it's just restrictive and I can never do it. Like you're not the only one and you don't have to figure this out by yourself. Schedule yourself a confidence kickstart call and let me help you, you know, work through what you've been doing, what maybe some tweaks you could make, and then let's talk about what that would look like moving ahead.

8:09Head on over to elevatefinances.us backslash kickstart. Schedule yourself a call and let's chat about budgeting. if you think about budgeting in the sense of like a guided tour most of us have been on those if you've gone to the big cities it's just easier you just go they have so many stops you get so many minutes there you know but as you're driving through the city the town wherever you are like oh my gosh i would love to go there. But on the guided tour, they don't typically let you jump off. You kind of finish it out. If you're on your own tour and you have a plan, say it's very similar to that guided tour, but you see something exciting and you're like, well, let's make a stop there.

9:01You adjust your plan. This is the same idea that you can apply to budgeting. It gets you to be flexible. You see how that works in that realm. I want you to apply that to budgeting. Give you some guidelines, give you some things that will help support you, but then learn to be like, I can kind of redo the plan mid month. Every two, three months when something happens, You got to tweak it a little bit, which leads me to point three. Overspending is not failure. It's giving, it's saying that something is misaligned. There's no need to just give up. There is no need to just start over or throw up your hands up the air and then find yourself back again in six months.

9:55No, no, no, no, no. I want you to go. I've overspent. I need to look into it. I need to get curious and figure out why. What is this telling me? I'm going to give you a scenario. You hit the end of the month or almost to the end of the month. You need groceries. Money's all gone in that category. Now what? Well, first off, you're going to go buy groceries because you need groceries. and then you're going to come back and you're going to say, all right, this is not failure. It's not failure. I spent more on my grocery budget and I need to know why. Here are two things you can do. The first thing I want you to think about the past month, your grocery trips.

10:46Did you stock up on anything? Did you grab meat because it was on sale? Oh, was this the month to buy toilet paper or paper towels? Review your purchases if you have access to them or just think through your mind and be like, oh, yeah, I did. That right there is telling you you need to make an adjustment in your budget. What you're going to do is you're going to add just a little bit every single month. That meat sale happens only every three, four months. Same with the toilet paper or paper towels, probably every six months. by adding 10, 15,$20, whatever it is for your household. And you can guess, you can guess.

11:29Again, if you overspend, you're going to come back to this, you know, exercise. You're going to do this. But adding that little bit, if you have an extra$10 or an extra$20 in three months, that's going to be$60. You stock up on meat. It's about 50. Perfect. Perfect. See how that works. See how that works. Make that adjustment. You overspent, but not because you were bad. You overspent because you haven't calculated for everything. Now as you're like, well, it wasn't stock up month for me. Now I don't know what to do. I got you covered. What you need to do is you need to track with intention. If you have your receipts from the past few months or have access to those receipts, because you really need to know what you bought.

12:19If not, you're going to keep receipts from grocery shopping every trip. Just make sure you have it, stick it somewhere. After you've gathered a month's worth or two months worth, it's going to take a little bit of time. This is when you're going to actually discover what the true cost of groceries is to your household. I can put down a number and I can say, I am only gonna spend$400 this month. That is going to feed us. And that is it. Now, some people have to do that, but they have to put in a lot of work. And if you're not willing to put in a lot of work, well, and I don't know 400 would feed you.

12:59But what I'm saying is like, we write down a number and then we want, we try to stick by it, but it's not true. Our grocery budget may actually be$600 a month, not 400. And you've got to believe that. You've got to see that. That is where you step in that second time. Instead of throwing up your hands because you overspent, because this happened, it's time that you get curious and find out. Make that adjustment and keep going with your budget. We budget, We refine it. We keep moving on. We have something else happen. This is a process. It's not perfect. We build a flexible and a sustainable budget.

13:52And as it grows with us, it gets to be where it's not that tedious. I sometimes I still have where I'm like, well, I spent more in my groceries than I normally do. But the way I have it structured, it doesn't cause me concern on just that category. There's a lot of different things that you can do. I had a client when she reached out to me, she says, I need your help. I am overspending and it's creating debt and I don't know what to do. And she was budgeting. She felt like she was failing. As we worked together, the one change we made, so I talk about these changes. She had worked with her budget, but the one change we made was separating her bill money and her spending money.

14:37And she says, wow, it definitely made me more aware. You've heard me talk about awareness. And awareness, not perfection, is what helped her regain control. So there's little things that you can do. But I really want you to understand that overspending doesn't mean you're bad at budgeting. It just means your budget needs to adapt to real life. It needs a little more massaging, a little more creativity. We've got to build in that sustainable and flexible budget. If this episode, the things I talked about, have hit you home and you're stuck in that, well, I overspent again cycle, or you've given up budgeting for the 10th time, knowing you need to do it, we need to change that.

15:29You and I. I want you to book your confidence kickstarts call at elevatefinances.us backslash kickstart. And let's map out how to feel steady, supported, and in control of your money. You don't need to budget perfectly. You just need to budget realistically. All right. To wrap up, I want you to have, you know, think about those mindset shifts. Think about what a budget truly is. It's a plan to help you reach your goal. And then we kind of massage it to help us get, number one, to help us get there faster, but number two, to help us find freedom with our spending. Budgets don't fail. We just need to create one that will flex with you.

16:17You're allowed to spend. When people are like, well, I can't spend my money. What does that mean? You're allowed to shift. You're allowed to be flexible and sustainable. That is important too. But you've got to learn how to flex with that last minute request to go out with friends, that last minute request to do something different. The overall goal of a budget is just to make sure you still have money and that you're reaching your goal. With the right mindset and the structure, your budget becomes a tool for freedom and not restriction. I love budgeting. Yes, I'm a numbers person, but I have worked with so many clients to help them find simple ways to budget, but creative ways and really freeing ways to take control of their money, enjoy spending, but also taking the steps that they need to reach their goals.

17:18I hope you learned something. I hope you're able to go take action, whether that is booking a call with me or just going and making those mindset shifts as you're working through your budget. I would love to hear how that's going. Head over to elevatefinances.us and send me an email. Let me know what you're thinking. I appreciate you for listening until next week.

17:42Thank you for spending this time with me. If you're not already following the show, be sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. And I'd love to stay connected with you between episodes. So come join me inside my Facebook community, Retirement Ready Hub for Gen Xers. It's where we're having real conversations about money, sharing wins, working through challenges, and building a clear path toward retirement. And remember, retirement isn't just a dream, it's a plan, and you get to make it possible.