Intentional Living: How to be Intentional with Your Finances | S3 E35
First I want to start this episode by saying that I’m not a financial advisor and all the advice given in today’s episode are things that I’ve found helpful for myself that I hope can help you as well.
Finances is an area that I’ve struggled with a lot in the past. Math was never my strong suite and I didn’t fully understand how to budget. In my 20’s I struggled a little with credit card debt because I wasn’t good at sticking with a budget or understanding how to space out purchases or save for the things I needed. I felt like I needed to spend money to be able to hang out with people, I wanted to have all the trendy things for my apartment and loved to eat good food. I was also paying off student loans and figuring out how to adult and pay all my bills. Growing up I never had to wait to buy things and money wasn’t a struggle so when I graduated college, a budget wasn’t something I ever learned much about until I graduated. It was the first time I ever really had to manage money. I tried learning different principles, using all the different budget apps, feeling shamed by Dave Ramsey’s programs and I felt lost trying to continually get to financial freedom.
I struggled with a lot of shame around money because I wasn’t good at sticking with my budget and felt like credit card debt was the worst offense I could have if I were to get in a relationship. I saw many of my friends saving so much by living with their parents but that didn’t work for me since I wanted to live in a big city where I didn’t have family. I constantly felt behind during my 20’s with my finances until I started understanding how to be intentional with my finances.
I finally found a budget that works well for me and put some systems in place to help me be more intentional. I worked on removing the shame and lies I believed about my financial life and started making more confident money decisions. I got more comfortable telling people no when I couldn’t afford to go out to eat or needed to focus on saving.
Everyone’s financial situation is different but we can all be more intentional with our spending and saving. I want to walk through a few practical tips that help me. And I also want to say that I’m far from perfect when it comes to finances and things take time but I’m in a much better place than I was years ago and these tips have helped me so much.
One of the biggest tips that helped me to be intentional with my spending and saving was having a weekly budget meeting with myself to be more consistent at tracking my spending and looking at my budget buckets. I honestly just use a spreadsheet for my budget that I got from a friend years ago so I track things in Google Sheets. Recently, I also began doing daily spend tracking with a template in Notion as well. Notion isn’t a financial platform, it’s more of an online notebook and organizational system, but there are hundreds of templates out there to build what you need to organize your life. I try to do my best to track my daily/ weekly spending in my Notion budget page so that it forces me to think about it more often. It can be so easy to swipe your card and lose track of where you are in your budget goals if you aren’t intentionally looking at it. I found that doing the old school way of keeping a ledger and reconciling my transactions helps me except I do it digitally versus the paper booklets our parents used. I found a more manual process was more helpful to me in being intentional but if apps like Mint or You Need a Budget or something else works well for you then go for it!
Another thing that has helped me to be more intentional in my finances is something I learned from The Financial Diet account. They suggested to keep a list of all the things you have the urge to impulse buy and wait a few months to see if it’s still something you really want or should budget for.
There’s a question that has also been helpful for me to make better financial decisions and less impulse spending. I try to ask myself if saying yes to this will push me further or farther from my future goals. Every purchase we make is either a yes to right now, a no to later, or a yes to later. If I know that I have a big savings goal coming up, I might try to be a bit more frugal with my spending. Or if I know I have a short term need like clothes, then I might cut back on eating out as much so I have room in my budget for new clothes. I try not to be overly restrictive with money but more so just aware of what I’m spending because it can be so easy to spend without thinking.
I’ve also limited the amount of marketing emails and accounts that I follow that tend to cause me to spend more. Society is constantly pushing spending on us and spending money isn’t a bad thing but overspending or spending money we don’t have is a bad thing. So I’ve noticed that unsubscribing from all the sales emails and the Amazon things you have to have right now type of accounts has helped me a ton.
The overall goal with being more intentional with my finances isn’t to be cheap or overly frugal or feel like I can never spend. I want to be intentional with what I spend, what I give and what I save and if I don’t know where my money is going it’s hard to be intentional. I’ve noticed when I don’t make time to budget or I’m not intentional with what I’m spending, it can feel overwhelming very quickly to me. This happens with my time as well if I don’t have a plan or don’t think through how I’m spending my time, I can get overwhelmed. And again this doesn’t mean that I’m not flexible or can’t go with the flow. Being intentional allows me to be able to be more flexible and gives me better boundaries for the different areas of my life so that I am purposeful with those areas.
Being intentional in all these different areas of my life also helps me with the anxiety I struggle with. Being able to live life with intentionality allows my brain to not stress so much, it allows me to help others more and allows me more freedom and flexibility.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this short series on intentionality. This is something that I’m very passionate about so we will do more series on this in the future as well as more content on the blog for this area. I hope you’ve been able to learn some different principles to help become more intentional and that you’ve found this beneficial.
I’m very excited for our next series because it’s one that is near and dear to my heart. We will be doing our next series all about Church. I sit down with several trusted guests and leaders to have real talk about the things going on in church culture, what the real intention of church is according to the Bible, how to overcome church hurt and more. I hope you will join me for this next series because I think it will be so impactful for leaders and those of us in the church.
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