I Save £700 Every Month... So Why Am I Still Broke? | Budget Bestie

[00:00:00]How many of you can relate to the part where you're really intentional with the start of the month with your budget? You set aside a certain amount of money into your savings, and then at some point in the month, usually about halfway through the month, you are like, "Okay, I've got no money." So, you pull all that money that you put into your savings and spend that, and you end up the month with no savings. If you can relate to that, that is exactly what's going on in the Budget Bestie today. Hi guys, I'm Aura Body Basics, and welcome back to Budget with Aura. My name is Aura, and on this channel we talk about budgeting, paying down debt, and saving up for the life that you truly deserve. If that sounds like something you'd like to watch, please consider subscribing to the channel because we do have a lot of fun over here, Bestie. Yes, we absolutely do. In today's video, we are continuing my series called Budget Bestie. Budget Bestie is a series of mine where people anonymously submit their budgets to me. I take a look at them and see what I would do if I was in their situation. This is not financial advice. However, sometimes I can offer a little bit of how I would do their budget in their situation, which can help them make an informed decision about their budget. But, I am all the be-all and end-all of budgets. The great pearls of wisdom always come from the comment section. So, if you would do something a little bit differently, make your voice heard in the comments down below because not just this Budget Bestie is going through this situation.

[00:01:11]There are many people going through this. So, if you've got a different spin on it, a different technique, a different way of doing stuff, make your voice heard because it can be very, very powerful. So, today we've got a situation where they are dipping into their savings every month, and they are not quite getting the traction that they want. So, let's get into it. So, if you want to be considered for a Budget Bestie, there is a form down below.

[00:01:31]There's a form builder, and just give me as much detail as you want. But, the first question that I ask is, "What is your main financial issue?" So, what's stopping you from achieving your goals?

[00:01:39]They said, "I keep spending and dipping into my savings. I only spend during occasions throughout the year. The kids' birthdays, who are both in November, Christmas, and Eid tend to be my biggest ones. My husband also has a large family, so I pay for multiple birthday gifts for our family every month. I'm a gift giver, and something I enjoy, so I wouldn't want to stop doing this. I just need to get better at saving for it.

[00:02:00]Okay, so big family, I can relate. I've got six brothers. I completely understand, especially when you're in a culture where gifting is a big part of it as well. So the issue is that they don't have money for the gifts. It's they don't have it saved up ahead, so they don't feel ahead of the situation in a month where you've got, I don't know, 10 birthdays or something. That can wipe you out and you weren't necessarily prepared for it. Okay, I get it. I get it. Okay, so they do have an income. It's 2,700. They are married, but that's their half and they pay for certain bills of it. So when we go to doing the budget, there will be things like mortgage, rent, whatever that the husband takes care of. So the bills that we're looking at are the only bills that they have. There's no debt as well, which is a good thing. When I ask what are they saving for, they say, "I'm saving for the future, and mainly for my children. I haven't gotten far. My money has recently increased as my job role has changed. I have 2,000 so far." So they saved 2,000 so far. I tried to budget 2,000 and save 700, but because I overspent every month, I use the 700 to pay myself back rather than putting it towards savings. They then go on to say, "My husband pays for the majority of the bills. I pay for the children and the weekly groceries. I normally put around 400 lb towards sinking funds, but because I'm not saving in advance, I end up using all of the money for big events. For example, in May, I had 10 family birthdays plus a school holiday."

[00:03:18]Here are the sinking funds I tried to save for. So they list a load of sinking funds, which is absolutely wild. So we'll try and like sort of trim those down to make sense. Okay, so I think it's time to look at the budget because there's a lot going into this. All right, let's do it. Okay, so today we're in my paycheck bill tracker. This is my pad that is available on my Etsy store.

[00:03:39]There's a couple different colorways. We are running low on stock. Do you know what? I've I've had purple for a while and I don't think I've listed them. So I'll have a go at me in the comments. If you want the purple one, let me know. I really like this because you can break down your income, then take the bills away from it, take what you put into cash envelopes, take what you do into sinking funds, and take away your debt and your savings into that as well. And then you're left with what you're left over. It's a lovely, lovely thing to have. Also, if you are someone who is practicing a budget, it's really good because it's a pad. If you make a mistake, you just tear it off and start again. So, we're going to get into this.

[00:04:12]Let's start with income. This is the thing that doesn't really change. So, we've got income here, which is 2,700.

[00:04:19]That's something that's not going to change. So, bills are next. Now, there's not a great deal of bills, but it does rack up and you'll start to see that it does rack up quite high. So, they are a responsible for the TV license, which is about 15 pounds. Then they have a Canva subscription, which is 10.99.

[00:04:40]They Patreon for someone, and that is 3.60.

[00:04:45]They have Apple storage, so Apple, which is 3 pounds per month. They have a teacher subscription. What did they say it was called? Good morning, Miss Foster. Sounds awful, which is 4.99.

[00:04:57]Then we have after-school club, so we're after-school club, which are 200 pounds per month. And then they have kids' lunches. List that separate for from the groceries. So, maybe they're paying for lunches at school. So, that's 100. Then they list my lunch, so their lunches while they're at work is 62, a very specific number. And then Glossybox. So, I'm assuming that's like a makeup subscription, but they did say that they weren't happy with it, so it's getting canceled in sort of October. So, 12.50 there. That's all of their bills. So, that comes up to 412.08.

[00:05:36]Which when we subtract it from the 2,700, we're left with 2,287.92.

[00:05:43]So, we've got a lot of money to move over into the next bit. This is the bit that I list as envelopes. They might not treat them as an envelope, but for me, that's how I would treat them. So, we have food. So, it's groceries and stuff like that. They do 800 lb per month. So, a family of four, 800 lb seems pretty reasonable. Then we have spending, so their spending money. They give themselves 100 lb per month. And then they have travel. So, they don't drive, but they need to travel to work. That is 225.

[00:06:14]So, all of that comes up to 1,125, which leaves them with 1,162.92.

[00:06:23]Now, they didn't list how much they put into their sinking funds. They said that they do about 700 lb, but then overspend. So, I'm not going to list any sinking funds cuz there really, really was a huge amount of sinking funds. I've done a list that is much more succinct and much smaller based off of what I know and what I think would be more appropriate. So, we're going to move down. Then they do have charity here.

[00:06:47]I've put it in this box just because it's so variable. They normally they budget 20, but normally spend a lot more. And then I they want to add kids' future, which they have about two grand in there, but they didn't say how much they actually do. So, I'm going to put 20 for now. I'll leave them with 1,142.92.

[00:07:06]So, this is why I do it like this. If you don't list a specific amount of money, it just means there's no plan for it. So, it might as well be like this.

[00:07:17]So, if this is all you're accounting for each month, this is your budget, this is all you're expecting to come out and all of that, you're going to look and see this amount of money in your bank account every single month and go, "Okay, well, I can just do this. I can do that with it." And spending's easy and all of that. So, when you're a bit more concrete with your plans and stuff like that, you can rest easy knowing that everything's going to get catered for and everything's going to be okay.

[00:07:42]When you have a plan for every pound, then it makes life a lot easier. If you have a loose 1,200 pounds, of course, things are going to go awry. So, what we're going to do is we're going to work out a plan how we would go about doling out the money and making sure that all of the commitments are met. So, let's start. Income is not going to change.

[00:08:01]Like, that's just the way it is. They've just have had a promotion, so congratulations. So, this is the way it is. There's two things that I would change here. First of all, we know that Glossybox is going to go, but I would move this my lunch thing, 62 pounds, I would move that out and change spending to 150. So, we've got lunch and spending all within the same thing. It kind of makes sense. They've got like this amount in their purse. 150 pounds divided by four, what is that? That's 37.50 a week, which I think is pretty reasonable, yeah? When we look at how the rest of the sinking funds and all that are going to go, it's not going to seem as harsh as that. So, if we take those two away, it means that this comes up to 337.58, which now leaves them with 2,362.42.

[00:08:47]And then this now becomes 1175, cuz it's 50 pounds more. Leaves them with 1,187.42.

[00:08:55]So, they've got about 20 quid extra cuz we've taken a little bit of money away from my lunch and and the whole of the Glossybox away. So, let's talk about sinking funds cuz this is where the real thing is going to go. So, they normally do about 700 pounds of sinking funds.

[00:09:10]We're going to do slightly more than that based off of what I interpret their needs to be. However, they may wish to change some values, right? So, first of all, we're going to go Christmas because half of their family is Christian. We're going to do birthdays because that's a big part of their life. Then we had two separate listings for Eid and Ramadan.

[00:09:32]I'm going to put them together because to me it's the the sort of thing they're going to be spending their money on, so it makes sense for me. However, I don't celebrate it, so it's not something that I know an awful lot about. Then they said home is quite important to them, then health. Self-care we are going to do because they said that they'd like to get their hair cut, obviously, and there was something else. What was it? Beauty and hair, so like skin care, stuff like that. Then we have clothing, so that's like I don't know if it's just them or the whole family. Then they wanted holidays and half term as separate, but I just put them in the same thing. Back to school, so they have two kids getting them back to school, and then finally Hajj. Christmas, I'm probably saying about 1K. So to save up 1K in a year and be able to spend that in December, they want to be chucking back about £85 per month. I would say Ramadan Eid will probably be about 1K as well because we've got food, clothes, we've got gifts, we've got a lot of stuff to do in Ramadan. So I'm probably going to say £85 per month as well. Based on their family size, they might want to do more, they might want to do less, but I'm thinking if you want to get to a K, it might be like a good idea. Birthdays, not knowing but they did say they had 10 people in one month. So I'm thinking 25 birthdays in a year, they want to do £40 per birthday, and that means they're going to want to do about £1,000 as well. So we'll go 85 there. Home and health, £50 a month just to have a little bit, and then clothing, I do the same. Self-care I looked at. So haircuts, skin care, and specifically haircuts in somewhere that's like hijab friendly, I think [music] £500 for the year. Do you think that's all right? So for £500 for the year, so we did for 480, 480, we are going to do £40 per month. I think that's reasonable. Now for holiday and half term, I was saying 1,800 for the year, depending on where you want to go on holiday, where you want to go during half term. If you're going abroad, that might not stretch very far for a family of four. However, I'm thinking if you want to 180, 150 would be where you want to go to. I Googled back to school, how much does it cost to get a kid back to school? It said about 450 pounds. So, if we want to get to 900 pounds by the end of the year, we want to do 75 pounds per month.

[00:11:56]And then Hajj, I looked at that. So, a Hajj pilgrimage, depending on how cheap you want to do it. You can do it as little as three grand, but it can go up to like 18. Somewhere roughly in the middle, an average cost would be about six grand. So, in order to get 6K in two years, it would be 250 pounds per month.

[00:12:15]Now, what I don't know, is this a personal one, or is it for the kids as well? What are we doing there? So, if it's a personal one, and you want to get the money in two years, 250 would be absolutely fine. However, if you want to stretch that out over a little bit more time, you can use the money from that in to go into something else. So, this is based off of my assumptions, what I understand. I think this is pretty like fine. This comes up to 920. So, it's more money than they originally were planning, the 750. But, if we look, everything is covered. We've got food, we've got spending, we've got travel, we've got our own stuff, the kids are taken care of as well. Comes up to 920, leaves us with 267.42.

[00:12:58]Charity, I wouldn't really change because I said that they do a little bit more of that all the time, but it in this money here, we can do zakat or sadaqah like with that. So, I I think it would be enough if we are want to do a little bit more charity, we can take it from this money here. Kids' future, based off of what we have left over, 200 pounds per month. Now, what if we did that across a year? That's going going up with 2,400 lb, which per child is 1,200. When we type wait for that over 10 years, it'll be 24K uh or 12K per child. And that's across 10 years. And the reason why we've worked out is because we can't just chuck that into a LISA. As a Muslim, they can't pay for or benefit from any interest as well. So, we got to like keep it like in a bank account just as it is. So, if this is not where you want to be in 10 years for each child, something needs to change in here, yeah?

[00:13:57]So, let's finish out this budget and see what I would do to sort of tailor this like to be really specific. So, what this comes up to is 220 lb. Leaves us with 47.42.

[00:14:08]And we could even use that 40 quid to make turn this into 60 if we really wanted to, right? So, this is where it comes to like the fine-tuning piece. So, if this was my budget and I looked at my guy, "Mhm, that's not quite right for me." I'd then think about, "Okay, exactly how many birthdays are there?"

[00:14:23]So, if we work out there's only 20 birthdays, yeah? So, if there was 20 birthdays, and we want to do 40 lb per month per birthday, we just times 20 by 40, that's 800. Then divided by 12, this becomes 66 lb rather than the 85. And we can move the money somewhere else. If we're like, "Oh, okay, I spend much more on Eid, so I want to do more. Christmas isn't a huge part of my life, so maybe I want to do less than that. I've got a huge home products, so I want to do more, which means I need to take some money out here and move it over there."

[00:14:57]If we stick to around 920, we can do it for sure. Based off of my preliminary research, this would get you in a good place. The only situation, right, is that this stuff is coming at you full force. And this is something that I don't necessarily approach too often on Budget Bestie. I think it's all very well and good me going, "Oh, yeah, if you put 85 lb a month away, by Christmas you'll have this much money. But, we're halfway through the year now, so what are we going to do? You just inevitably have to double it, which means something else just has to sacrifice. For this person, birthdays are coming in thick and fast for this person. But, in order to get ahead of it, you need to start saving stuff. So, where you've saved a little bit of money elsewhere, potentially use that cuz things might be able to pay each other back. But, getting ahead of stuff is very, very difficult when things are coming at you full force. But, having a plan and not going over budget in the small areas, that can be really, really helpful. So, this is the budget that I would go for.

[00:15:59]Please let me know in the comments down below, do some of these things seem realistic? It's hard to do it not knowing the true size of their family.

[00:16:06]It sounds like they have a massive family, and you can understand where originally it looks like they have 1,142 left over. If they have like so many birthdays, you can see how much it dwindles down. So, yeah, this is what I would say would be reasonable. The work really needs to happen into the sinking funds of being really realistic and then just being so strict and stringent in these areas, so that you don't go over because it really depends where your priorities are. Because that's a lot of sinking funds. That's going to give you a very, very happy life. But, if you want to do more for the kids, you need to take some money out of there. So, yeah, it's all about playing with the values to really, really figure out where your priorities are. Because if kids' future is number one, it needs to have the lion's share. But, yeah, making sure that you are really, really fair with this stuff, so that you don't start taking away from the other bits. But, yeah, that's what I would do. Let me know in the comments down below if you would do anything differently. Hi guys, guys, it's my pals. Thank you so much for getting through to the end of the video. You know I love it when you get through to the end of the video. Please give this video some love. Make sure you like, comment, share, and subscribe. And if you are going to comment, please use this emoji. This one was a pretty tough one for me. Like, there's a lot of experiences in this one. Like, life experiences that I've never necessarily come across. I don't have two children.

[00:17:19]I don't really think about the future in terms of like saving up for someone else's future on a regular basis.

[00:17:26]Getting kids ready for school, hard, all of that sort of stuff is very, very alien for me because I kind of just live in the moment and I think about what I want here and now. And I don't know whether that's a I'm never going to have kids sort of situation, so I don't have to think about it, or whether it's a like a bit of a selfish trait of mine.

[00:17:44]But either way, it's really, really illuminating to do these budget besties because it just makes you think about things completely differently. So, if I've got something wrong, you got to let me know in the comments down below. Have you considered becoming a channel member or patron? Patrons get exclusive content, sneak peeks, and significant discounts off my Etsy store. Channel members get early access to every single video. In fact, they've seen this video long before you have, bestie. If you'd like some of those perks and you'd like to hang out with me, have a look at the links in the description. You will not regret it, bestie. And a special thank you to our top tier patrons, also known as sugar daddies. Angie, Emma Playford, Susan, Tasha Bouvier, Tony Leland, and Tracy Dowdy. Okay, that is all for me today and it is all for the budget bestie for this month. I hope you like this one. There are a lot I think I'm being a bit more regular with budget besties. They're not as fun to do for me anymore cuz I I don't even know what number this is, but I know we're in like the 60s or something. But I know you lot love them. So, they will still be coming. Don't fret about that. But uh yeah, I think we're at the end of this video. Until the next one, bestie.

[00:18:47]I would like you to have a wonderful day, have a wonderful week, and have a wonderful budget. Always remember, don't trust Ira. Thumbnail is going to have to be me holding this.

[00:18:58]What are we calling this video? I don't know what we're calling this video.

[00:19:18]>> He hit a pug. Okay.

[00:19:21]I'll see you next month for another budget bestie or bestie.