Episode 5: A Peek Into Our Personal Finances

Welcome to another episode of the Let’s Venture Podcast. Today, we are going to talk about one of our favorite topics to geek out on: personal finance! This is something Mollie and I have worked on tirelessly over the course of our marriage so that we can be on the same page in our business and personal lives. We will cover both the practical aspects of how we track our money and the principles that guide our management philosophy.

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The How To

First, I want to go over the high level practical process. We look at different parts of our budget yearly, monthly, and weekly. Let’s start with yearly. At the end of each year, we take a bird’s eye view of our personal year ahead. This includes:

• Large expenses that we’re planning for
• Vacations / travel expectations
• Etc. 

The point here is to make a plan for the year you can work towards. Of course, it won’t always go that way. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try!

Next is the monthly process. This includes a budget meeting. We talk about what we’ve spent that month. Did we go over our allotted amounts for a certain expense? Did we not spend as much as we thought we were going to? Then we talk about the plan for the next month. This meeting gives us a chance to change things around based on what’s been happening.

Finally, we arrive at our weekly budget process. This is a simple weekly process that Drew does to add transactions, credit cards and auto withdraws from that week into the budget template. This process helps ensure that we’re accurately tracking our spending by category.

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The Principles

First, Cash is King (or Queen)!

Whatever you want to call cash, taking care of it is important in both your personal life and small business budget. The principle of cash flow works for both small business and personal budgets. The first way that we do this is we treat credit like debit, ensuring we can pay off credit cards in full each month. We total up our credit card bills throughout the month. This is very important so we get an accurate picture of how much we will owe and how much cash we need to have on hand. Buying within your means and talking openly about this with each other has helped us implement this process well!

The second way that we do this is by keeping an emergency fund. We try to keep three months of personal expenses in the fund, easily accessible for a rainy day.

The Second Principle is Centered On Goal Setting.

Mollie is the queen of setting goals. Making financial goals is key to success. It keeps you motivated and inspired. Sitting down every year and every quarter to review and set those goals helps you visualize the year ahead.

There you have it, a peek into our personal finances! We hope that this helps you and gives you some tips and tricks to implement into your own financial process. As always, check out the Facebook Group for a community of entrepreneurs and our other resources on our website!