I can’t tell you how many times this has played out, and I’m wondering if you can relate.
I’m on my way home from a long, tiring day at work.
Anybody a teacher out there? When you’re a teacher, you have to put a ton of energy into your work each day and you just feel absolutely exhausted at the end of the day.
So, on my way home, I’ll call my wife. Because we don’t really have a plan for our food and because we’re exhausted, we decide that I’ll just drop through the fast food line and pick something up.
Then, after about a month of being in a bad habit of doing this, our food budget is blown and we have a ton of groceries at home that we didn’t even touch.
For me, I can say no to expenses all day long when we go to Target or the mall but I have a really hard time when it comes to food.
We’ve been doing a lot better with sticking to our meal plan and eating at home. We eat at home more now than we ever have, and it’s really saving us a ton of money. It’s amazing what a big difference in spending having a plan can make.
Food is a big budget category that a lot of people blow. When you blow this category, you are literally eating your money. When we stick to our budget, we save a significant part of our budget each month.
Here’s the really important part. Eating at home and saving when it comes to dining out has a huge impact on our budget.
It’s a big win.
Why Focus on Big Wins?
If you really want to make fast progress with your money, you need to focus on big wins. It’s really easy to focus on minutia when you’re trying to trim your budget down. You take a look at the cable bill, your monthly subscriptions. In some cases, you start giving things up that actually bring you a lot of joy.
When you focus on a big win, you’re looking at either the biggest ways you can trim your budget to make a huge difference, or finding a way to earn more and completely change your budget each month.
When trying to reach any financial goal, our goal is to get as much margin as we can between how much we make and how much we have in outgo. If you have no room, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to pay down debt, save for retirement, save for a vacation, or save for a car. So you have to make sure that you are making enough, and you have to focus on bigs wins to bring your expenses down.
There’s only two sides to this equation.
You have Income-Outgo=0
There’s only two levers to play with and that is how much you Make and how much you spend and save.
Next week, I’ll be talking about focusing on the big wins we want to make in our spending. This week, it’s all about focusing on how much you earn.
There’s two places where you can earn more. That’s focusing on moving forward with your career and earning more through a side hustle.
Job Promotion
Here’s one of the biggest wins that you could focus on. That’s moving forward in your career.
Work hard while you’re at work. Get more training to prepare yourself for that next level. Go to your supervisor and have a conversation with them about what you need to do to get to that next level.
Throughout the week, you spend roughly 1/3 of your day at work, 1/3 of your day for personal time, and 1/3 sleeping. Now, that would be a perfectly balanced day. You never have a perfectly balanced day I know, but it’s up to you to even out the eb and flow of your life to find the balance that’s right for you, not for me.
It’s really important that we enjoy our work. If we’re going to spend 1/3 of our life at work, then it’s going to be pretty important that we love what we do. Work doesn’t need to be something that you dread and can’t stand going to. It needs to be something that, on the whole, you get fired up about and enjoy doing.
If that’s not the case, you may need to change your mindset, the way you think about your work. We have a very large amount of control of how we perceive our day based on our thoughts. Make sure that you’re doing healthy activities for your mindset to put you in a state that allows you to excel at work.
If you are in a job you hate, or are in a toxic environment, it may be time to look for a way to move on.
It’s important that you’re doing work that you feel matters to you.
If you are digging in to your work each day, and you feel like, on the whole, you can’t get enough of your work, then you are ensuring your progress through your career up the pay scale.
Regularly seeking promotion and putting yourself in the best spot to showcase your individual genius at work could translate into thousands of dollars extra that you have in your paycheck each year.
Plus, when you’re engaged and enjoying the work you do, you’re much more likely to lead a happier life on the whole. That will translate into less dollars spent because you aren’t using money as a means of escape from work you hate.
You work is such a big part of your life, it’s so important that you are doing something that you love doing and making more while you do it.
Side Hustle
Now the teachers reading this really had a problem with that last section. The problem is that sometimes you have a job that you’re passionate about that doesn’t really have a way to continue doing work you love while moving up the pay scale.
If you’re in a job that you love, but you really wish you were paid more, listen up because this section is for you.
What would $1,000 extra a month mean to your bottom line? If you’re feeling really tight, it could be huge.
For me, since my wife and I are public school teachers, the amount that we get paid year to year doesn’t really change. We get small raises but essentially, teachers don’t move very far forward during their career in pay.
If you love your job, but you still would like the increase the amount you earn, start a side hustle.
Everyone can start a side hustle. In fact, Chris Guillebeu, author of 100 Side Hustles says that everyone regardless of income should have one.
This is a big win that I’m focusing on. For me, I am concentrating not only on keeping our expenses down, but earning more. This blog is my side hustle. I’m taking something that I’m really passionate and good at: finances, and combining that with something that interests me and works with the amount of time I have to devote to it: blogging. With my busy job, and having two small kids at home, I don’t have the time to work one on one with people on their finances. But you know what I do have time for? Waking up early each day to do some writing, something I really enjoy doing.
I’m patient, but over time, this blog will start to earn a side income which will greatly help us reach our financial goals. This is not a get rich quick scheme, I know, but it’s satisfying to me.
The trick with a side hustle is to do something that you’d want to work on for free anyway. That way, it’s something that you can enjoy on the side without burning yourself out. If you just feel like you’re doing more work, you’re just going to get tired and stop.
A band director that I know, Jenna Yee, started working out using the Beach Body program because she wanted to get into shape anyway.
The Beach Body workout program functions a little like an MLM but Jenna doesn’t make it feel that way.
She signed up as a coach simply because she wanted to get the discount on her shake supplies and she got a few friends to sign up as accountability partners. Fast forward several years later, she’s a coach with a strong instagram following that feel inspired by her each day.
The cool thing is that she now makes more from her coaching side hustle than from being a band director. It has completely transformed their finances. She works hard at it but it’s something she enjoys doing anyway so it doesn’t feel like a drag.
What could you do to earn some income on the side? Think of what you enjoy doing anyway on a Saturday morning. Is there anyway you could turn that into something that makes yourself a little side cash?
Do you build furniture?
Is there something you make that you could sell on Etsy?
Is there something that comes easy to you that you could coach other people on?
Final Thoughts
So much of the personal finance stuff out there is obsessed with cutting, and make no mistake, you do have to cut. After all, you could spend as much as you make no matter the income.
But I want to encourage you to look at both parts of the equation.
income-outgo=0.
Next week, I’m going to focus on the big wins we can take when it comes to our spending and saving.
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