Speaker 1: Figuring out your financial life doesn't have to be a struggle. Hi, I'm Brian Jewell, creator of 30 Days to Financial Freedom. You know, my financial life used to be messy and difficult, too. But a few years ago, I started learning how to make sense of the confusion and began living in financial freedom. Today, I want to share some practical ways that you can do the same thing. Now, to start, I want you to think about a stressful situation in your life sometime in the past. Now, chances are the stress wasn't caused by you going into a situation where there was lots of clarity and you knew exactly what was going on and exactly what you should do. Instead, that stress was caused by chaos and confusion. You were in a situation that wasn't clear. You didn't know what was going on. You didn't know what was coming and you didn't know what to do. Chaos and confusion and unclarity cause stress in life. They cause stress in your financial life the exact same way. You might think if you're having money problems that they come from not making enough money or spending too much money or having too much debt. And while you might have some income problems or some expense problems, what you really have is a clarity problem, because most people have no idea what's going on in their financial life. They don't really know how much they have coming in. They don't know what's going out. They don't know what they should do. People struggle with money when they don't have clarity in their financial lives. When they don't have clarity, they lack clear values and priorities. They don't even know what they value most in life. They don't have priorities in life. And so it's difficult to make financial decisions that support those priorities when you don't know what the priorities are. And many people, they don't know where their money is going and they don't know how they'll cover upcoming expenses. And they don't see a way out of debt and into prosperity. That kind of chaos and confusion causes massive stress in your financial life. I don't want you to live that way anymore. So what I'm going to give you today is a simple three step plan for creating clarity around your finances. Let's get into it. Step one, you need to build your budget. Now, you've probably heard the term budget before, but there's a good chance you have never made a budget. And that's because a lot of people think as think of budgets as being something scary, something controlling. They think having a budget means you're broke or that you're chained to some inflexible plan and you can't do the things you want to do. None of that is really true. OK, a budget is just a plan for your money. It's a plan you make in advance that tells your money what to do. Now, there are lots of great methods you can use to make a budget. There are apps that do it. There are websites you can use to do it. You can use a spreadsheet. You can even use a pencil and paper. It doesn't really matter how you do it. What matters is that you do it. And here are the basics of how any budget is going to work. First, you list the income that you expect to have for an upcoming month. All of the money that's going to come in. Next, you want to list all the expenses you can think of that you're going to need to spend money on during that month. And then you subtract the expenses from the income. What you have left after you do that subtraction is either going to be a surplus or a deficit. If you have money left over, it's a surplus. If you have spent more than you've made, it's a deficit. As you can imagine, that's a problem. Now, once you do that exercise, it's going to bring immediate clarity to your financial life. When you see your expenses clearly, you can make smarter decisions. That's the whole point of a budget is they allow you to see your expenses clearly so that you can make smart decisions about what you're spending and what you're doing with your money. Once you have built your budget, you can move on to step two, and that is start your savings. You know, a lot of financial stress comes from not knowing whether you're going to have enough money for the things you need in the future. But you can eliminate that stress by starting a savings habit. There are a variety of things that you need to save money for. One is just upcoming expenses. You need to buy Christmas gifts later this year. You need to pay for your car registration, and it's going to take money to do those things. You need to save some money now so that you have it later when you need it. Something else you need to save money for is emergencies because bad things happen in life and it's going to take money to pay to get them fixed. So you need to try to have some money saved up to pay for them. If you don't have any right now, start with the goal of saving just a thousand dollars in an emergency fund. And then later on, as you go, you can save more money for bigger expenses that might come later. Finally, you need to be saving money for big purchases. You know, from time to time, you're going to need to buy things that cost a lot of money, like buy a car, buy a house, something like that. I don't want you going into debt for things like cars. Instead, if you save in advance, you can buy them with cash and it saves you a ton of money and interest, and it just removes a ton of stress from your life. Now, how do you save money like this? Well, you need to use surplus from your budget. So when you build your budget, you need to eliminate expenses until you get to the point where you have a healthy surplus and then dedicate that surplus to your savings. It's important to realize this saving money now solves financial problems later. Once you've got that savings habit down, you can move on to step three, and that is defeat your debt. You know, debt is a huge cause of financial stress. And most people today have thousands and thousands of dollars in debt. If you could get rid of that debt, it would eliminate a ton of stress from your life because debt keeps you perpetually stressed out. Debt is a cycle. You don't have the money you need now to buy something you want. So you borrow money to buy it. But because you borrowed that money, you have to make monthly payments and pay interest. And that keeps you from saving money you need for the next thing. And so you have to borrow more money for the next thing. And it's this vicious cycle. But you can break the cycle by creating an escape plan. Here's how you do that. After you saved a thousand dollars, you want to use the surplus money from your monthly budget to start paying off your debt. But don't just pay willy nilly and don't just make minimum payments. Instead, you need to list your debts in order by their size. Pick your smallest debt and use your entire surplus to pay it off and keep going that way, systematically paying off your smallest debt. You're going to use all your surplus towards your debt. And it might take some time. But over time, if you will work systematically and work hard and be focused, you can pay off your debt. And this creates incredible freedom and removes a huge weight of stress from your life. Getting out of debt frees you to pursue a future of prosperity. And that's what you really want. Now, if you want to learn more about bringing clarity to your finances, I would love for you to check out my absolutely free video series, Stress Free Finance. This free five part video series is going to give you a step by step guide to calming your chaotic financial life so you can build a better future and have less stress. You can sign up for it really easily. Just go to the link below or you can go to 30 day freedom slash stress. I can't wait to help you get in depth about eliminating that stress so you can build a better life for yourself. I'll see you at Stress Free Finance really soon.