Where Can I Find Extra Money In My Budget For Retirement Savings

0:05Welcome 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, Dailene Higgins, money coach and retirement strategist to help you gain clarity and confidence with your money by creating a spending plan that aligns with your financial goals and dreams so you can spend intentionally, save consistently, and feel at peace about your future. Join me every week to understand your money, simplify your decisions, and take intentional steps toward the life you want.

0:49If you keep waiting for extra money to save for retirement, you could be waiting a very long time. In this episode, I'm going to help you change how you look at extra money and how you can actually find savings. So coming back to the problem that you have, you need to save more for retirement. That's the advice out there. That's where you're like, I know I need to go into it more. Maybe you've heard me say at least get to 10%. Life is expensive. And you may already feel strapped. Yeah, most people do. And if you had kids just go back to school, that was a big expense. And you're like, life is so expensive.

1:36Then you look at your grocery bill, and that is more than it was six months ago, even though you know you're buying the same things. And heck, if you do feel like you're on top of it, things are going well, then all of a sudden, a large expense shows up and you're taking money out of savings again. So how are you supposed to find more money to save? And you think to yourself, where can I find extra money in my budget? I've already cut back on eating out. I'm not shopping as much. I'm not really doing all the things I used to. So I don't understand why I can't see that I have extra money. And so with all of these efforts, with all of these thoughts, with all of this positioning, you just think, okay, I'm just going to deal with it later when the kids are gone, or when I get a raise or fill in the blank.

2:35It's very easy to try to find a solution, met against the wall, found some frustration, and then just say, okay, if circumstances change, which would be kids are leaving or I get a raise, then I can do something with it. But waiting too long will have you missing opportunities to really get ahead, to actually find the money that you need to and put it to good use so that you can meet your goal. Sooner is better. So instead of waiting, the retirement strategy session can help you take that first step. Head over to elevatefinances.us backslash session to learn more. All right, so how do you find extra money?

3:26Where do you go to find this extra money? Step one, as I want you to shift from thinking about money as extra, that is the problem. There's no such thing as extra money for anyone. I don't have extra money. You don't have extra money. Nobody has extra money. So if you're thinking, I'm looking for that extra, the only place you're going to find that is the penny on the ground or the dollar bill on the ground that someone is no longer around has lost. It wasn't even extra for them, but it's extra for you now. That is the only time. What you need to do, you need to shift that word from extra to savings.

4:18Where do I find savings in my money? Where do I find savings that are going to help create or help me reach my goals and my desires? Okay, so we're shifting from the word extra to savings. We do have savings. We don't have extra. Step number two, you need to budget with the intent of identifying savings. I think most of the time when people go to budget, 99%, maybe 75%, people head in and think, okay, I'm being restrictive because I got to cut back on my spending. I've got to do these things. And that's really the wrong approach to budgeting. You really need to head in with the intent of identifying your savings.

5:15So this is truly what you have left after you have identified how much you pay for bills every month and how much your spending is. That's not really a month, but for right now, that's what you're going to use. What is left over from that becomes your savings. My client discovered this when she came to work with me. Client E came to me saying she didn't have enough money. And she says, I don't spend a lot either. And that last statement was true. She wasn't spending on a lot of things. She was my lower income earner that I've worked with on the course of these four and a half years. And after the first session, the retirement strategy session, I helped her discover that she had$400 available for savings every month.

6:08She felt like she didn't have any. I helped her find the 400. This is how you actually budget. So from my low income earner, which is client E, to my high income earner, which is K, client K, she has$3 ,000. It does depend on what you make. But in everybody's minus one individual I have worked with, all of them had savings, no matter how they felt. So when you can identify your savings, your quote extra, this is the money that you can then use to help support your stability and reaching retirement. This is the money that you're going to control and direct to reaching your goals and desires. Now, how you do that is how you manage your money.

7:05And I will be talking about that in an upcoming episode. But it's important to recognize that I can't let this X number amount of dollars, so client's E-400 dollars, we helped set up a plan that helped put all of that into place for whatever her goals and desires were. Step number three. So we budgeted, we found our amount. Now we do have our bills and our spending. Most people go to spending. You already did. We talked about that at the beginning of the episode. Cutting your eating out, cutting your, a lot of people love to cut their grocery budget. My number one piece of advice, do not start there.

7:45Do not start there. You cannot balance your budget on groceries. It's not effective. It's not fun. And it's not going to be worth it. So where do you go to find these possibilities within your expenses? The one I'm going to use that I can demonstrate very easily, everybody has, is insurance. Whether it's auto, home, or both, they have deductibles. Now, if you don't know, most people do, the higher your deductible, the lower your premium. And a lot of people, some people that I've heard, they'll decrease it down to$250 for their deductible, then they don't have to pay anything in the end. However, if you increase, I think standard usually they quote you at about$500, take it up to$1 ,000.

8:39You may see a savings of up to$100,$150 a year, depending on where you live, how much you're already doing. So you're going to save on your premium. How much in a year? This can go to support your goals and desires. Now you've increased your deductible to a thousand. You have to have that thousand dollars sitting somewhere just in case something happens. That's why a lot of people choose the 250 because they don't want to plan for this thousand. But if you take this thousand dollars, you are going to actually get some extra money. Okay, this is where I would say this is extra. You're going to park your$1 ,000 in a high yield savings account.

9:28Right now they're earning right around 3 % and you're going to leave it there till you need it and it's going to sit there. That means you're going to earn$30 a year. Now I just heard you because my clients do it too, but it's only$30. Don't only yourself 20 times because what if it was$30 20 times? That's a large amount of money. So you got to start somewhere. This is truly that savings is extra money. So there are many other areas to explore within your expenses of what you're already paying to make sure that you're getting the best price and then taking that money and shifting it to your savings.

10:15Again, that is all supported really well when you have a system. And that money system is what we will be talking about in an upcoming episode about how to manage your money. That's really where things get lost. That's really where people really miss out on that power of savings. As we wrap up this episode, I want you to not think about extra money anymore. And even if you haven't been and you've been really struggling with trying to find savings, I want you to add the word potential. Where could I find potential savings? Where are the opportunities to grab a few more dollars. I think sometimes we are wanting something bigger than because that's going to solve the problem rather than compounding on these smaller amounts time after time.

11:16So if you're frustrated because you feel like there's no extra money to save, I want you to stop guessing and find out what's actually possible. Book a retirement strategy session with me, you can head over to elevatefinances.us backslash session. And in that session, we'll look at your numbers together. We're going to uncover your monthly savings availability and identify the next steps for you to turn that savings into progress, not only towards your retirement, but the other dreams and desires that you have. It's really important to not get stuck on extra or I don't have enough money or I just need to make more.

12:03These are all things that we can't control in a lot of sense. So if we can come back to actually learning how to control what we have and lose the restriction, that is the biggest piece I work on with all my clients is to step away from that restriction and more into the freedom. Giving yourself grace in bills and spending so that you can save. That's what we do together. I don't say, you need to cut this so you're going to have this much to save. I said, this is what you're spending. Go and spend it freely. Go make sure that is how much you're spending, especially if you haven't tracked before.

12:46So being able to, number one, get out of that thought of extra money and getting away from the restriction has to happen for it to be possible. None of that is true. Looking at it differently, having somebody to support you through that will help you begin to see what you actually do have. And once you see what you do have, your goals, your dreams are endless. So that's it for today. I hope this gave you a little more clarity, a little more confidence around your money. Keep going. You're more capable than you think, and I'll see you next week.

13:29Thank 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.