Lighter & Brighter Series 02: Your Tips for More Enjoyable Budgeting

This essay originally appeared in the Monday morning newsletter on 4/26/21.

It’s the last Monday of the month, which means it’s time to share reactions and feedback gathered from the second installment of the Lighter & Brighter series. 
 
The Lighter & Brighter Series is like a monthly book club… but sans books and focused on making everyday parts of life more enjoyable. Every other month, a new topic will be introduced on the last Monday of the month with some ideas on how to make said topic more enjoyable and lighter. If any of it resonates with you, we’ll experiment together for the next month and share feedback on how it’s going. Then, in the month that follows, the reactions and any new ideas will be featured in a newsletter (like today!), so we can all learn from one other.
 
The result? We’ll end 2021 with a tangible takeaway: our very own joy toolbox, filled with a variety of strategies, hacks, tips and tricks for bringing lightness into six different areas of our life.
 
At the end of last month, I wrote about budgeting and posed the question of, what tips do you have to make budgeting more enjoyable? I received a lot of great suggestions (thanks to all who shared!), and I’m excited to pass along the ideas this morning. 
 
So, without further ado, here are some crowdsourced tips and tricks for more enjoyable budgeting – enjoy!:

Lighter & Brighter Series 02: Tips to Make Budgeting More Enjoyable 

• “I recommend the book from the Broke Millennial. She does a great down breaking down budgets, savings, and paying down debts like personal and student loans. I’m also reading her book on investing now. Investing my money is the next step for me!”
• “My old style of budgeting was to check my bank account and make sure there was still money in it. I was an intuitive spender. I’m really good at talking myself out of spending my money, so that by-and-large worked for many years. I’ve been tracking my spending for about a year now, and it’s nice to know that I’m generally good with my money, and to know what I can afford.”
• “I’ve learned that my money can unlock my values. I have set aside a certain amount of money to donate to charity each month. Rather than indiscriminately give to whatever charity caught my attention at the moment, I know exactly how much money each month I am giving. This is way helpful with taxes, too. One goal I had this year was to become a monthly donor to a local non-profit. I think of philanthropy as a lifelong relationship between you and your community. Can you tell I was raised by a fundraiser?“
• “Set up automatic savings in your bank account. I use PNC’s Virtual Wallet, and have a certain amount that goes to my ‘Growth’ savings account each paycheck. You can also set up sinking funds in your ‘Reserve’ short-term savings, which is very similar to your friend weekend scenario. You can make a rule to put $10 or $1 or whatever from every paycheck into this account until your goal is funded.”
• “Don’t underestimate how small shifts at the grocery store can add up. When possible, I buy frozen vegetables over fresh (you can roast frozen vegetables directly from the freezer!). Frozen is often cheaper than fresh and they don’t go bad. My grocery store also has a butcher counter and I always have the butcher ‘butterfly’ my chicken breasts to create two thin chicken breasts out of the one. Cheaper and cooks faster!”
• “Create a budget using ‘Mint,’ I have used it and I don’t see any down side. It’s free, and since I use a credit card (ALWAYS paid off monthly) it loads all my expenses in automatically. I also have manually populated a spreadsheet from Mint so I can see monthly expenses easier.”
• “I use an app called ‘Fetch Rewards‘ where you upload your receipts to gain points and then they give you gift cards in return.”
• “I’ve found I learn the most about how I want to spend money by learning how others spend money. I like listening to podcasts about budgeting to get inspired and learn new ideas for optimizing my cash flow. My current favorites are Jean Chatzky’s HerMoney podcast and The Financial Diet’s The Financial Confessions podcast. I also love reading Refinery29’s Money Diaries series.” 

Thanks again to everyone who submitted an idea! If you have a tip or if you try out something from the above, I’d love to hear about it!

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