I’m Afraid to Budget Because Then I Might Have to Change

I’m Afraid to Budget Because Then I Might Have to Change

by | Mar 18, 2019 | Getting Started with your Money

It’s Monday.

On Monday’s I sit down and work out my schedule for the week.

it’s a new thing, but I’m really trying to get control of my time… and I’ve found this to be really helpful.

…. when I do it.

The funny thing is that every Monday I find myself actively resisting doing this thing. Actively doing anything else in order to avoid doing a thing I know for a fact has been really valuable for me.

And I had a thought about that which relates to both money and time that I wanted to share with you (instead of actually doing the scheduling).

Am I fighting the exercise of sitting down and budgeting my time because part of my brain knows that it’s impossible without major change?

This is my fear.

My fear is that the end of every exercise is that I need to make some major changes to how I spend my time.

My fear is that there are problems with my current habits.

Important things aren’t getting done, and less important ones are being obsessed over.

I know that if I keep sitting down and engaging with my time… I’m going to come to the conclusion that there need to be changes.

And not just changes… but hard conversations with people and projects that I really enjoy.

There might be disappointing people.

There might be accepting the fact that not only can I not do as much as I’m trying to do right now, but in fact… I’m not succeeding at doing all the things I’m committed to in this particular moment.

And that sucks.

Are you fighting the exercise of sitting down and budgeting your money because part of your brain knows that it's impossible to actually balance things without major change?

Because if you are … I get that.

I get wanting to bury your head in the sand and not know… because as soon as you really know… as soon as it’s there in black and white in front of you, you have to deal with it.

And that might mean some big changes.

It might mean spending less.

It might mean major changes in what you feel you’re able to do.

Except you’re probably not actually doing it right now. You’re probably making a bunch of commitment and then as the money runs out… backing out of some, or borrowing from the next months commitments to temporarily get through another week.

You know you need to do less, you need to spend less, because you feel the stress of not having enough to handle all your current obligations.

That’s why you’re worried about it.

That’s why I’m worried EVERY WEEK about my time.

But I’m also scared of doing something. I’m scared of fixing the problem.

And I know that doesn’t make sense, but I think to some of you it might make a whole lot of sense.

For today I’m going to acknowledge that feeling. For today I’m going to hear that fear and not tell it that it’s completely crazy.

But also… today I’m going to budget my time anyway, I’m even gonna try and find something to say ‘no’ to. … and maybe next week it’ll be a little easier. 

Update: I wrote this piece almost a year ago and never published it on the blog. It's so interesting to think about that struggle with time and how much differently I feel a year later. The numbers are scary but THEY HELP. I promise they do. 

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

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I Need to Make More is a Really Terrible Income Goal

I Need to Make More is a Really Terrible Income Goal

by | Mar 4, 2019 | Getting Started with your Money, Living with Variable Income

For those of us that don’t love numbers we often use the same words over and over to describe what we want with our money: more, less, and enough.

“I just want to have enough to live my life.”
“I need to make more money.”
“If only I could spend less, things would be much easier.”

But those are really hard things to do, and they’re made even harder because you haven’t given yourself any tools to actually solve the problem.

How much is enough? How do you know when you’ve gotten there? How much more money do you need to make? Are you just going to take every single job possible until it feels like enough? And spend less… on what? How much less? How much are you spending now?

Real Numbers Help Solve Real Problems

Putting real numbers on things is scary. It really is. Maybe you’ve experience that already by filling out the KNOW YOUR NUMBER worksheet or using THIS SPREADSHEET to map out your income for the year.

Maybe half way through those exercises you wanted to shut it all down.

The fear is real.

But on the other side of the fear is a tool. A tool for you to solve some of that stress that you’ve been feeling lately.

By putting thoughtful numbers on the way you live your life you can start to map out real opportunities for change. You can create a plan that lets you live the way you want and move forward on some of the big stuff.

Income Goals Can Help A lot.

Lots of us in the self-employed realm are what the internet calls ‘hustlers’. We take every job that’s thrown at us. We feel desperate to take every opportunity to earn income because you never know when all the work is going to dry up and the phone stops ringing.

Again… the fear is real.

A number that can really help in that war against fear is an income goal to aim for and there are a few different ways to think about making one.

  1. How much do you need to earn to cover your expenses: one way to build an income goal is to come up with your ‘breakeven number’. How much do you need to earn every money (or every year) in order to make sure all the bills are paid.
  2. Giving yourself a stretch goal: Let’s say you know your break-even number… but you want to go bigger. You can set yourself a goal that pushes you to grow more. I’ve been setting these kind of goals for the last few years and they can be really useful… and also terrifying.

If you’re interested in figuring out what those numbers might be, try THIS TOOL out (here’s A TUTORIAL to help you figure it out).

Balancing the stress of earning with all the other stuff you’re trying to do

People who work more conventional jobs often don’t have the option to ‘make more’. Unless they want to negotiate a raise, they’re stuck earning what they earn.

But as always, with great power comes great responsibility.

When I talk to clients about making income goals, whether it’s to cover their expenses or a stretch goal, we talk a lot about what’s possible and what that might look like.

Remember, there are so many parts of work besides what we’re getting paid for it. Is it the kind of work you enjoy doing? Does it still allow you the time and energy to do the other important things in your life?

Yes, you can make more money, but is it worth it? Maybe it’s a better trade off to spend less in order to balance out your enough.

… I know that sentence is almost entirely useless to you. But if you keep rolling those questions around in your head and start replacing those words with thoughtful numbers… you’re going to start feeling way more control over your money.

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

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How to Start Organizing Your Expenses … Just Like Marie Kondo

How to Start Organizing Your Expenses … Just Like Marie Kondo

by | Feb 18, 2019 | Getting Started with your Money

Just like everyone else with a Netflix subscription, I’ve been watching Marie Kondo’s show ‘Tidying Up’.

And here’s the thing… a lot of the things that stress us out about having a messy house are the same things that stress us out about our finances.

That feeling of having a stressful environment, the sense that there isn’t an order to how or why we do things can make it feel like we’re just surviving instead of living our lives the way we’d like to.

If that feels remotely familiar, let’s steal a bunch of Marie Kondo’s ideas and see if they can help.

 

#1:Dump everything out onto the bed

When it comes to sorting clothes, Marie starts by making people dump all the clothes in their house into one big pile. This totally works for money too!

One of the big reasons why it’s hard to get a handle on how much we’re actually spending in our lives is because our spending is so fragmented. There’s a couple of credit cards, a chequing account, and your PayPal account.

The first step is to try and make a big ole heap of all the things that you spend money on.

Remember, we don’t start sorting by making things organized. We start organizing by making a mess and getting a sense of everything that needs to be organized.

For expenses there are a few ways to do this.

  • You can grab a pen and paper and brainstorm everything you spend on.
  • You can skim (SKIM, NOT SPEND A TON OF TIME WITH) your bank statements and get a bunch of ideas.
  • You can use THIS WORKSHEET to give you some ideas of the various things you spend on.

Remember to include everything you spend: monthly expenses, annual expenses (Christmas, summer, etc) and business expenses.

 

#2:Like things go together

Once you see the whole picture you can start sorting things into piles.

I recommend you think about expenses in the following heaps:

  • Fixed Expenses: things that are the same every month (rent, cell phone)
  • Other Monthly Spending: things that happen every month but are different (groceries, takeout)
  • Annual Expenses: things that happen a few times throughout the year (Christmas, dental, clothing)
  • Business: things that are specifically for your business

A quick note on business expenses: for those of you who are one person businesses, many of the things in your personal lives are partially business expenses. Lots of people get really confused when I ask them to separate these ‘business’ costs from their personal life. Remember, this is not a tax exercise, this is an organization exercise. Start with the costs that are clearly business: the training, the commission etc. Then start dealing with the grey areas - your rent which includes a home office. Don’t spit them, just put them in the pile that they are most like. You can always move them later.

 

#3:Does it bring you joy

The crux of the Marie Kondo philosophy is around picking up an item and asking it … does it bring you joy.

This is a really useful exercise when it comes to your spending. In our weekly email a few weeks ago we talked about Emotional Return on Investment and Emily made a series of worksheets to guide you through the process of figuring out what expenses are adding to your life, and what are things that you really wish you could throw away.

 

#4:Quantify it: How much do you need

This is the part that’s different.

Once you’ve got everything sorted into piles and filtered through your joy lens… then start looking at the numbers.

How much do you need? What expenses do you know off the top of your head? Which ones are harder?

One of the things I love the most about Marie Kondo’s philisophy is there doesn’t seem to be any shame in the decisions that her clients make. She doesn’t care if you keep all the clothes or all the books… she just wants to make sure that you really want to keep all the clothes and all the books.

That’s what I want for you too. I don’t want you to feel shame around the amount of money you spend on things, but I want you to think deeply about those numbers and make those decisions on purpose… instead of by default.

… and I think that’s what Marie Kondo would want too!

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

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Am I Spending Way Too Much?

Am I Spending Way Too Much?

by | Feb 4, 2019 | Getting Started with your Money

Did you know that in Sweden all salaries are public?

You can just login to a database and take a browse through what all your friends make for a living… which from a North American perspective is a pretty hard thing to imagine.

What you make is something we tend to obsess about, whether we talk about it or not.

I think everyone has a basic idea of what an average salary range seems to be (even though I’m sure if we adopted the database system there might be a lot of surprise).

What we really don’t have much of an idea about is… what are people spending? And more importantly… is what I’m doing okay?

Is $2,000 of expenses a month a lot? Is $12,000?

What if I told you I spend $2,000 a month on my personal expenses?

Does that seem high to you? Way too low? Or are you just curious about how that might relate to what you spend?

What if I said I spend $10,000 a month?

… it’s higher… but what if that was total family income with 4 kids? Is that too much?

It seems whenever these kind of spending numbers come out, people get judgey without any real basis to make those judgements.

“Well… it’s WAYYYY more than I spend… so it must be too much”

OR

“They spend half of what I spend… they must be some kind of wizard”.

This is where the view we have of numbers being black and white is kind of misleading. The numbers in isolation don’t matter in the slightest…

Saving is good, Spending is bad

“Everyone” knows that you should be saving all the money and spending none of the money, unless you have managed to spend that money getting something for an incredible deal.

But also… that’s stupid.

We all spend a ton of money on the present. It’s pretty damn important. And what that amount is doesn’t matter as much in relation to other people as it does in relation to your own personal ecosystem.

So the first thing that I want from anyone asking the question “am I spending too much” is not to worry about there being any cosmic absolutes. There is just you (and your family), your money, and what you’re trying to do.

After you’ve accepted that it’s about exploring that balance for yourself:

  • What are you trying to do? How can money help with that?
  • What do you need to run your life? What is important to you?
  • How much can you expect to make? What feels like a safe estimate?
  • How do those things balance out? Are you spending way more than you think you’ll bring in?

It’s in the balance, the relationship between your goals, your needs, and your resources.

That balance might be $2,000 and it might be $10,000 but if it’s not balanced… there’s probably going to be some stress… no matter how ‘normal’ you feel.

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

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What Artists Believe About Money: Infographic

What Artists Believe About Money: Infographic

by | Jan 28, 2019 | Artist 2 Artist, Infographic

Whenever Emily or I do financial workshops with a group of creatives one of the first questions we ask is what people believe about money.

It might seem like a pretty hokey way to start a financial seminar, but it’s really important.

The things that we believe about money have an immense amount of power. They can filter the way we hear information. They tell us what’s possible and what’s not. They shade everything.

And sometimes, that’s a good thing, but other times those beliefs really aren’t helping.

Those discussions are always really empowering for me. So many of the beliefs people share are ones that I’ve struggled with and felt I was alone in.

So, we put a call in the creative community for the ‘things that people believe about money’ and put together a list for you below. While you’re reading through it keep an eye out for the ones that make you say “well that one is actually true”… that’s a tell tale sign that it might be a belief that you’re carrying around the world.

Remember, usually beliefs aren’t myths. Beliefs are often based off of true experiences. Building awareness around them isn’t about debunking them or exposing them as lies that we’ve built our lives around.

The question is… does this belief still serve me? Is it helping me build the life I want or is it holding me back?

And if it’s holding you back… how can you nudge it in a more helpful direction.

What do you think? Any of those jump out to you? Is there something that you believe that's missing... leave a note in the comments!

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

Want to start getting control of your money? How can I help?

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