What's the first thing you saved for?

Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money Video Series. My name's Stacey Powell, and if you're ready to not just know better, but do better, you've come to the right place.

And today I'm going to get a little real and tell a couple of stories about myself. Today we're gonna be talking about savings. It's the third chapter in the book, and it's not called savings, it's called, "Building Peace of Mind". Because I've come to believe that that is what savings does for people, and it's certainly what savings has done for me.

In the first part of the book, I ask you to think about the first thing that you ever saved for. I love hearing those stories from people. A lot of times it's saving in a piggy bank and some little thing that you bought when you were 5 years old. Or maybe as a teenager, your first car.

I'm quite sure that my parents at some point "taught" me how to save or told me that I should, I honestly don 't remember. And when I think about the first thing I ever saved for I can't think of a single thing as a kid, a child, a teenager that I saved for.

In telling the story of the first thing that I saved for, it's a little bit embarrassing actually because I was pretty old. I'd already graduated from college. I already had a really good professional career. And I had never really saved for something that I wanted to buy.

So I did, like I've mentioned before, something that I was told to do, that I kinda thought maybe was a little bit ridiculous.  I started setting small amounts of money aside for things. And one of the things that I started setting aside for was something that I'd always wanted and that was a really, really nice Native American flute.

Now we're not talking about anything worth a couple thousand dollars here, but we're it wasn't a cheap $50 flute either. It was in the low hundreds and at the time to me setting aside that money just felt irresponsible. I had a lot of other important obligations that I was trying to meet. So I took an amount of money. First it was $5 then it was $20. And I put it in this little envelope every single month, the cash, I got the cash, and I put it in this envelope until I had saved enough to buy it.

I could have bought it at any other point in time by just doing the machinations that I had been doing, really, my entire adult life. But it was, it was the action of saving for that and the gratitude of going out and searching for just the right flute that I wanted. It was that whole experience; I just hadn't done it before. You know, and I should have done it when I was 5. I should have done it when I was a teenager. I should have at least done it in my 20's. But that just wasn't my reality. I had never done it before. So when I was practicing, it felt kinda silly.

But we all have to learn to ride a bike somehow. If we don't learn to do it as a child, then we've got to learn to do it as an adult. So when you get to that question in the book or that question in the video, "What's the first thing you remember saving for?", if you can't remember saving for something, then I want you to do what I did. Because I learned something really important. It wasn't about the flute, because jump ahead years later, I have so many savings accounts. For prudent reserves, for vacations, for taxes, for all kinds of stuff, fun stuff.

I am now a savings master. And I think it's fun. And it all started with what felt like a silly little tiny itty bitty exercise. But in the end, it's what I needed to do. In some areas, I needed to just dial back and start again. And so for those of you that need to do that too, go do that.

Because the rest of the chapter we're going to talk about all kinds of savings. And it's kinda masters level savings that I'm going to be talking about, and I want you to be ready.

And as always I don't want you to do it alone. This stuff isn't necessarily meant to be done alone, head on over to Facebook and join our Team Do Better Group or sign up for our newsletter at thefinancegym.com or subscribe to our subscribe to our YouTube channel. And join us in learning how to build peace in our lives through savings. Thanks for watching.

How to Get Away with NOT Budgeting Your Money

Welcome to the Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. My name is Stacey Powell, and I'm here to help you have a healthier, happier life with your money.

Today's video is kinda a fun one. It's called you don't have to budget, and it's the second one in a 2 part series. The last video I posted talks about who can get away without budgeting. And in today's video I'm going to teach you the things you can put in place so that you don't have to budget.

Because, here's the thing, if you pay yourself first, all the time, all of your important goals, then you don't need to budget. But you've got to get the structure in place to make sure that you're one of those people that don't need to do it. And what I'm going to teach you today is about impound accounts.

I'm sure a lot of you have heard about impound accounts and those of you that are homeowners you more than likely already have one. Every time you make your mortgage payment you probably paying a specific amount that is set aside for your property taxes and homeowners insurance. It's great! It becomes part of your monthly budget you don't ever have to think about it; you don't ever have to worry about it. It's just done and taken care of every single month.

Wouldn't it be great if all of your important goals were set up that way? I'm posting a blog this week with some specifics around it, but let me give you a couple of other examples.

Santa saver accounts? I know hardly anyone does those anymore, but I have clients that do them, and they love it because in November all of a sudden a bunch of money gets plopped into their checking account. They have extra money to go spend on whatever holiday related thing they want to spend the money on.

A couple of other examples, if you're a business owner, hopefully, you've got an impound account set up for your estimated quarterly taxes so once a quarter you just write a check right from the funds you've been setting aside.

Impound accounts around emergency reserves are great, Whatever it is. A lot of you probably have an “impound account”, even though it's not called that, with your 401k. You never notice that money. It gets taken right off the top and set aside into an impound account called retirement. You're not going to touch it for a very long time, but you don't ever have to think about it.

So when you look at all of your important goals, big vacations, college tuition upcoming, whatever it is important. If you set up an “impound accounts” for every single one of those things, then whatever you have leftover at the end of moving all that money around, that's your budget right there.

And if you want to go out to expensive dinners or buy really fancy shoes or purses or whatever, who cares? Because your more important goals are already happening, and that's all that matters.

So if you can do all that work and put that structure in place that in essence is creating yourself a “budget” without doing the mathematical work of it and tracking.

But if you do all that and then it becomes painfully obvious that you don't have any money to go out to eat, you maybe don't have any money to go to the grocery store. Well, that's some hard news for those of you, you do have to budget.

Because when it comes down to it, if something is that out of balance in your financial life that you're having to worry about those basic kinds of needs then you've got to roll up your sleeves and put numbers on paper. Add them up and speak your truth, every week, every month, every year for a little while. I swear you won't have to do it for the rest of your life. You probably won't have to do it for 10 years, but a year or 2 or 3. If you're looking for financial peace and things aren't balancing then this is the way to get it done.

And as always I don't want you to get it done alone. Come on over to our private Facebook group, Team Do Better. There's people there working on the same stuff you're working on. And I'm there to answer questions for you. You can also check out our finance boot camps at thefinancegym.com or subscribe to the videos. Now go get it done.

You Don't HAVE to Budget Your Money!

Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money. I'm Stacey Powell, and I'm here to help you have a healthier life with your money.

And I'm kinda happy about today's video because I'm going to explain to you today, why you don't have to budget. You know of course a bunch of you will have to budget, but here's the thing... When I wrote this book, I thought long and hard about where to put the budgeting chapter. Part of me didn't want to put it right up front because it scares people off. And if your one of those people that it scares off then I want you to listen really carefully to today's video.

The other reason I didn't necessarily want to put it right up front is that budgeting isn't necessarily the most important thing in the whole book. Saving and earning in many ways is far more important.

The truth is, though; budgeting is really key for a lot of people. But if you're one of those people that absolutely hate it, and you're never going to make it to chapter 3 because you're going to stall out in the budgeting work in chapter 2 then I've got really great news for you … skip it. I want you to skip it.

I want you to turn the book to chapter 3. Leave the budgeting behind. And I want you to attack, with fervor, all of the other chapters in the book. And if I let you out of doing chapter 2 you have to promise that you do all those other chapters with fervor.

Because here's the thing, if you work on savings, getting out of debt, increasing your earnings, all the work in the other chapters, you might get to the end to the end of the book and discover that you don't really need a budget because your money is now good.

You also might discover that, alright, maybe you do really need to do the budgeting work. But the thing is by the time you get to it, by the time you circle back to it from doing all the other work you will have built some money muscles that you didn't have before. And so budgeting isn't going to be as hard as you thought it might be.

So if you're one of those people that aren't going to finish my book because you hate the idea of budgeting, then I want you to jump ahead to Chapter 3, Building Peace of Mind, which is arguably the most important chapter in the book.

And I also want you to watch the next video in the series because I teach an important component about how to get away without budgeting, how to build your finances so that budgeting becomes much more simple.

And as always I don't want you to do this alone, come on over to Facebook and join our private Facebook group, Team Do Better, or join one of our Finance Boot Camps at TheFinanceGym.com and sign up for the YouTube series, subscribe so that you know when the next video goes up.

4 Secrets to Financial Health - Finance Action Plan - Part 2

Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series.

If you’re ready to not just know better but do better, you’ve come to the right place and today I’m going to share with you the secret to financial health.

The secret to financial health is earn more, spend less, save more, and don’t debt. That’s it. Simple. If you can do all four of those things consistently, you’re not going to have any money problems at all.

But you probably wouldn’t be watching this video if you do all four of those things consistently. So we’re going to delve just a little bit deeper today. If you’re following along in the book, I want you to turn to page seven, chapter one, and if you don’t have the book, that’s all right. Grab a pencil and a piece of paper and we’re going to write a few short paragraphs about a few questions.

So, one of my great beliefs is that we spend so much time looking at numbers when we try to fix our financial problems. We don’t really connect with our feelings and our thoughts and our beliefs around it. So I like to have people write down what they think about their saving, their earning, their debting or not debting.

So on each of the four pieces of secret of financial health, I want you to answer these questions. Thinking about the last year, how was your earning? And about the last year, how was your spending?

I also want you to write a short paragraph about your savings. Did you save? Did you use your savings or would your short paragraph be two words like mine would have been years ago. What savings?

And then of course debt. Write a short paragraph about how your debt was over the last year. Were you chopping it down? Were you growing it or you just don’t have debt? If you don’t, write a really great paragraph about that and pat yourself on the back.

Last but not least I want you to back up and look at the big picture and write the short paragraph just about your overall feelings about how you and your money are.

Hope you learned something by the power of putting pencil to paper today and remember, you don’t have to do this alone. In my Date Night with Your Money chapter, I talk about the power of tackling your next money to-dos as a part of the community.

How to Save Money & Get Out of Debt - Action Plan - Part 1

Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money. If you’re ready to not just know better but do better with your money, you’ve come to the right place.

Today is the first video in the series and because it’s the first one, we’re going to talk about beginnings. My financial beginning and then I’m going to ask you about your financial beginning.

So I’m just going to start out by speaking the truth. My journey with money, my path of writing this book and doing these videos is that I was in a complete financial mess and could not pull myself out of it with all of my professional financial knowledge.

I had a dirty little secret that literally no one, not my best friend, no one in my family, no one knew. I filed bankruptcy. It was my secret. There’s a lot to the story I could go into but that’s the truth. I don’t think I need to say anymore.

My financial life was that messed up and it should have gotten better after that and it did a little bit but it didn’t get better like it should have and that almost made me more ashamed that I couldn’t pull it together after wiping away a portion of my debt. I had portions of my debt that I couldn’t wipe away with bankruptcy and every time I want to just get into the story, I remember, you know, we can’t live in our stories. My whole point of what I teach and what I did to make my money life better was to just do it, to just do better, to ask for help, find somebody. Pull up a chair with them and do it with them. If you can’t do it alone, do it with somebody else.

So my question to you is, “What’s your beginning? Why are you listening to this video? If you’ve bought the book and started reading the book, why did you buy the book? What do you want to accomplish? What are your dreams around money?”

You don’t have to do this alone. In one of the chapters in the book, Date Night with Your Money, I talk about the power of tackling your next money to-dos as part of a community. If you want to be a part of our community, subscribe to these YouTube videos or join our Facebook group. Have a great day.

- Stacey Powell

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