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How to Set a Budget in Less than 10 Minutes (I Challenge You!)

8th October 2018

budgeting in 10 min

I challenge you to set your budget in less than 10 minutes.

No seriously – once you finish reading this, I want you to grab a timer and set up your budget. If it takes more than 10 minutes, I will get on a Skype call with you and we will go through it together (contact me here).

This is because I am extremely certain that budgeting does not have to be something that takes hours and a lot of mental preparation. Personally, I spend 10 minutes a month adjusting my budget, and now I’m going to tell you how you can too.

Read this post, grab a timer, and follow these steps. You’ll be pleasantly surprised 😉

How to set a budget in less than 10 minutes

1. Add up your income

Hopefully you have a pretty good estimate of how much you make every month. This could be coming from your maintenance loan, support from your parents, a job, etc. So now I want you to add this all up and write it on a piece of paper (or memorise it).

We’re going to be following the story of Annie, who saw this post and is now challenging me to set up her budget in under 10 minutes. Go Annie.

She does some quick thinking and breaks down her income into:

  • Maintenance loan: £300/month
  • Parent support: £200/month
  • Weekend job: £300/month

From this she determines that her total monthly income is £800/month.

 

2. Download Yolt

yolt unthink money

No I am not affiliated to them (I wish). Yolt is an app I use to track and control my budgets. I’ve tried quite a few others, and this is my favourite. It’s free, easy to use and looks nice.

So take out your phone, go to the Google Play store or App store and download Yolt. If for some reason you can’t do this, try downloading Money Dashboard or YNAB; similar apps – same concept.

Annie has a snazzy Samsung. She hops onto Google Play and downloads Yolt. ‘That wasn’t too hard.’, she thinks.

 

3. Sync Bank

Once Yolt is downloaded, you need to sync your bank so it can take in all your transactions. To do this you go to Accounts > Add or customise accounts > Add account > Select account/bank.

yolt banks

Select your bank, enter your details, and voila!

If you’re wondering ‘Wow I’m giving all my personal details to this app – is it secure?’ I assure you these apps cannot sell your details and it’s all encrypted and anonymous. For more details check out their FAQ.

Annie goes ahead and syncs her student bank account (HSBC) with Yolt. Pretty simple. The app is loading, telling her that in a few (precious) minutes all her transactions will be available to see on her dashboard. Annie is excited.

 

4. Set & track your budget

You’ve probably used up 5 minutes of your time now, and the next 5 minutes are the real nitty gritty of the setting your budget. But trust me, it’s just as easy.

Before playing around with the app and checking out its cool features, I want you to actually set up your budget – you’ll have plenty of time to explore the rest later.

So go to Actions > Set budgets. This is where you will be setting the different categories you’ll be spending your money on and what the maximum will be.

yolt budget
yours will be empty – this one is mine with my current budget for this month

Click on the little + button on the right hand corner and you’ll see some 35 categories to pick from. Now is the time to budget: click on every category and set how much you would like to spend on each one.

yolt categories

Let’s follow what Annie does. She goes through every category and sets the budgets:

Housing (so rent): £400

Groceries: £100

Drinks: £100

Shopping: £50

Transport: £50

Travel: £50

Savings (Choose the ‘Investments’ category): £50

Which gives a nice total of £800.

Of course, every person will have different categories and different amounts, but remember that if this is your first time budgeting, this is an estimate. At the end of the month you may realise ‘I need to allocate more to Transport and less to Drinks’ – and that’s totally fine. A bit part about budgeting is constantly adjusting.

Make sure it all adds up to your income and BAM, you have set up your budget.

5. Adjust and stay on track

Your 10 minutes are probably up by now, but the budgeting is DONE. Congrats, you have just set up a budget! Easy peasy right?

Now the important thing to make sure is that Yolt allocates your expenses into the right categories. So every now and then, enter the app, check the expenses that have been processed and make sure they’re in the right category.

You can do this easily by going to Transactions > ‘clicking on any Category’> ‘clicking on an expense’> ‘clicking on its category’> ‘changing the category to the appropriate one’.

yolt groceries
as you can see, this category has the correct expenses in it

I love how easy it is to see all your expenses nice and clearly. You can quickly see how much you have left you have to spend on that category for the month, and can adjust accordingly. Pure genius. 

Annie has set up her budgets on Yolt and is now going through each transaction to make sure the App recognises which category it belongs to. Now she can go out into the world knowing her expenses are tracked, her budgets are set, and she is in control of her money. Go Annie.

 

Once again, if you took longer than 10 minutes or have some questions to ask, feel free to contact me or comment below! I truly believe in the simplicity and power of budgeting, and I want you to be able to make the most of that.

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Financially Mint is on another break! ☕ I will Financially Mint is on another break! ☕

I will be living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for the next few months, and then hopefully heading to Australia. 
My plans for the next year:

I'm putting the career testing theory into practice. My next career test is working for an NGO here in Kuala Lumpur. This week will be my first week. I will be working with sex trafficking survivors and I've also been asked to do some financial education presentations to help the staff.

After that the plan is to move to Melbourne, Australia, and do my next career test: consulting. If that doesn't work out I will try another career test which may be more achievable: business development in a startup. Thanks to the amazing career books that I've read, I'm pretty confident I can get an interesting job. We'll see how it rolls. 🏀

How am I funding this? I'm very excited to say that I've managed to grow my part-time freelancing income to a full-time income that can sustain me in South East Asia (I would need to work full-time in Europe). I'm calling myself a 'Freelance FinTech Writer'. Rent is crazy cheap (like 300€/month) and it's literally cheaper to eat out than cook. I'm still able to save 15% of my income. 🎉🎉 The increase in clients and pay has been thanks to all the effort I put into Financially Mint, and to some crazy cold emailing and networking in the past few months. 
After some thought, I concluded that learning mark-up language (HTML + CSS) was a more efficient use of my time than writing blog posts and working on FM... so I am now taking a break to learn some basic coding and decide what to do next.

I will still be podcasting and taking part in the FI community on Twitter and everywhere else... so I'll still be seeing you around 😉

To our success 🎉🎉
Only 30% of jobs are posted online. 🙄 Let's sa Only 30% of jobs are posted online. 🙄

Let's say you've got a list of career paths to test. You've figured out a direction, you know which sector you want to work in and you've got some cool companies in mind.

But then what? How do you get an internship in the company you really want to work for? How do you get a job in that specific NGO? How do you get them to notice you? 🤔

In FM's latest post I share a strategy that I am still testing but seems to work - copied from a book titled 'Designing your Life' by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans:

The strategy: Conducting 'Life Design' Interviews. .
A Life Design Interview is basically meeting the person that has your 'dream career' for coffee. ☕

You find someone who is working at the company you want to work for, in the sector you want to work for or simply has a position you're interested in, and you reach out to them (LinkedIn helps). You ask about their story, their position, how they got to where they are and their advice to people starting out. 
This is what I've been doing for the past month in Edinburgh, and of the 40 people I contacted, I met 8 of them for coffee, my goal to simply learn about their story.

With an added bonus: Trust. ✅

Not only did I learn stuff about working in a startup, or as a content writer or working in an NGO, but I also built a trusted connection. It's those connections that help you find the hidden jobs, the dream careers and the best opportunities.

Check out FM's latest post for a proper run down on Life Design interviews. 💪 (Last week we organised the FI Europe podcast retreat! An amazing 4 days doing speeches, masterminds, debates, boat trips, beach and surfing. Post on this coming soon 🔥)
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#financiallymint #budget #budgeting #personalfinance #savinghacks #makemoney #savemoney #money #shoestringbudget #moneyhacks #moneysavinghacks #financialeducation #financialfreedom #adulting #savingtricks #earnmoney #lifeadvice #counsel #careeradvice #retirement #investing #careerbuilding #skillbuilding #career #selfimprovement #inspiring #fieurope #lifedesign #interviews
Investing in yourself now will return bucket loads Investing in yourself now will return bucket loads in the future. 🔮

I talk a lot about this on Financially Mint - how taking the time to build career capital and explore career paths will allow you to find a career of best personal fit, which will then make you the money you need.

But it is true that I am personally at the very start of this journey, and so can't offer many examples of this working. 🤷‍♀️ Well today, this changes as I interview the Financial Gladiator, who did exactly that.

He went to university to study business in Poland, and finished his masters in Australia. In the meantime, he was doing internships, making connections, building skills and beefing up his portfolio. 
He says it himself: ' I always looked to add experience and skills to my repertoire rather than dollars' 💸.
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7 internships later in several different countries and industries and a lot of hustling, moving around and learning about what career fitted him best, FG ended up in a job that paid him a six figure salary. This kept on snowballing, and in his early thirties he hit a salary of over $500,000. .
That goes to show how much investing in yourself can return in the future.
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$500,000 annual salary doesn't need to be your goal, but it still goes to show that you'll make the bulk of your money after investing in your own career. 📈

A great interview filled with actionable career advice and FG's complete story, check out FM's latest blog post! (Edinburgh castle 🔥)
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#financiallymint #budget #budgeting #personalfinance #savinghacks #makemoney #savemoney #money #studentmoney #studenthacks #studentlife #shoestringbudget #moneyhacks #moneysavinghacks #financialeducation #financialfreedom #adulting #savingtricks #earnmoney #lifeadvice #counsel #careeradvice #retirement #investing #careerbuilding #skillbuilding #career #selfimprovement #inspiring #work
Most of us don't know what we want to do in our tw Most of us don't know what we want to do in our twenties 🤷‍♀️. And that's absolutely normal.

But that's why we don't want to be committing to one thing - who know what you might want to do in 5 years? 🧐

Instead of committing, why not be exploring, investigating and testing career paths. But how can you do this cleverly without being a typical 'millennial-career-hopper'? By building career capital at the same time.

This means that every career test you do will help you build skills, connections and a more solid portfolio. If you have no idea where to start, here are some examples of jobs/activities that can help you build career capital:

1. Working for a growing organisation with a growing performance: this could be consulting, a startup - anywhere with a good mentor and team 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
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2. Graduate studies - for those who want to work in research, a think tank, etc.
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3. Building a valuable and transferable skill - skills such as writing, programming, designing, data science, etc will always be useful in the future 💻
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4. Creating content - you don't always need a shiny piece of paper or a medal to show that you've done something. Creating your own thing can be just as useful.
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And much more amazing career advice... in FM's latest blog post 🤓
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(I’m running out of pictures to post so here’s one of a beautiful evening in Edinburgh) .
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#financiallymint #budget #budgeting #personalfinance #savinghacks #makemoney #savemoney #money #studentmoney #studenthacks #studentlife #shoestringbudget #moneyhacks #moneysavinghacks #financialeducation #financialfreedom #adulting #savingtricks #earnmoney #lifeadvice #counsel #careeradvice #retirement #investing #peoplemanagement #skillbuilding #career #selfimprovement #inspiring #work
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