Finances. Over the past year working with Clay and the business coaching team, I have learned many life tips that have changed the way I do things at work and in my personal life. The first biggest tip was to track our spending and the second to start automating our savings. I always paid bills and made sure to pay them on time so I wasn’t sure what other tracking needed to be done until after my husband and I blocked out time the first pay period we had after getting married. We sat down with our laptop and my phone. The first thing we did was create a google sheet and had two columns in it: one for tracking our expenses and the second for tracking our income. We logged into our bank account on the phone and went line by line tracking every transaction in our newly joined account. After tracking everything that had been spent or earned we deducted bills that would come out before the next paycheck and we set a budget for how much we would need to spend on food. Third, we transferred the leftover money (not much at all) into our savings account. We repeated this process in every pay period.
- First Step: Put in our earnings in the income column
- Second Step: Deduct for upcoming bills and food in our expenses column
- Third Step: Transfer what is left to our savings account
The benefit of sitting down and tracking our business coaching finances was immediate peace of mind, I do not go to bed worried about money, Andrew and I do not stress about whether we can afford something. There is no looming monster of debt we are afraid of. We know where our money is and what it is going towards. In the words of Dave Ramsey “A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.”
The second tip we added was automating our savings. This idea seemed backward to me at first, I did not understand what the difference would be in paying bills first and putting the rest in savings after the total amount saved would stay the same. To my surprise, our savings actually doubled the first paycheck we received.
The benefit of sitting down and tracking our business coaching finances was immediate peace of mind, I do not go to bed worried about money…
The switch from physically transferring over money into savings after paying everyone else to automatically withdrawing a percentage before we even saw our paycheck was astounding. We paid ourselves first and everyone else second. We aren’t saving leftovers, we are setting a percentage of our income aside and budgeting accordingly with the difference. I have found that while automating our savings we can still tithe, pay our bills, and eat without pinching pennies. I am thankful to Clay for teaching this important business coaching financial lesson.
