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Spending Money On Fun
Ever felt guilty for indulging in some fun spending? In this episode, let’s talk about learning to manage your finances for pleasure without the shame. Let’s dive into the tactics of guilt-free spending and transform the way you see your budget. Tune in, simplify your money, scale your happiness, and let’s eliminate financial guilt together. So, let’s go!
Are you ready to turn the page on financial guilt and learn the art of spending joyfully on life’s little pleasures? Buckle up because this episode is all about making FUN a part of your financial equation, guilt-free! So, let’s go!
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Podcast Key Points
0:00 – Episode Overview
1:23 – Wax on wax off with your money
2:48 – Purpose of your budget
4:48 – Play account
12:39 – Recap
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Spending Money On Fun
How do you know how much money you do have to spend on fun? That is what we are talking about today. The fourth part in our guilt-free impulse spending series. So, here we go!
This is the Your Money Your Life podcast. I’m your host Aimee Cerka, a money confidence coach for female entrepreneurs on the path to six figures. After over 10 years in the personal finance industry and multiple personal financial and medical crisis.
I was fed up with the lies that are being shouted from the rooftops by the Gurus and the media said I help you simplify, solidify and scale your money. By blending tactile money strategies with mindset work, you can create unstoppable finances. Together, you’ll finally figure out the money thing so you can make more money in less time without living off of beans and rice, or sacrificing your lifestyle.
Episodes here on the podcast are short and sweet. Being married, having four kids at home, homeschooling being the CEO running the household, I’m kind of busy. And I know you are too. So let’s keep it simple and get to the point. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here!
Welcome back to the Your Money Your Life podcast. I’m your host, Aimee Cerka. We are finally getting to talk about how to know how much money you have to spend on fun. The fourth part in our guilt-free impulse spending series. We are making it, yay!
Recap of Previous Episodes
Let’s quickly recap what we talked about the first couple of days if you haven’t watched slash listen to those yet, though, I highly encourage you pause this one and go back and listen to that I’ll make sure links are in the show notes. Yet again, because again, foundational like karate kid wax on wax off type thing. Okay. But day one, we talked about what is impulse spending, and the reasons why we do that which are all based in emotions, money mindset, those triggers those stories, they’re all there.
Day two, we talked about what we had to stop doing when it comes to impulse spending. And essentially, that was we had to stop haphazardly, impulse spending. We have to have tools in place; we have to stop spending without a budget, looking at a bank account and saying, “Oh, we’re fine.” That’s not how it works in. If you were like, “Oh, crap, I’m doing that today,” is going to be super, super helpful for you.
And then the third episode, we talked about the 24-hour rule. And the two main types of impulse spenders, the big ticket impulse spenders, and then the nickel and dime impulse spenders, which brings us to our fourth part here. We talk about your Play account.
Understanding Your Play Account
And I love talking about the Play account because it’s game changing. It saves marriages, it saves like finances, all the things Okay. Before we can get into the tactical, like how to have your Play account, let’s just kind of take a step back, because your Play account is part of your budget, okay.
And for a lot of people, we’re all hearing this all the time. Budget’s a bad word. Budgets, a four letter word, we don’t talk about it. And a lot of those stories, those beliefs come from the fact that we feel like budgeting is meant to limit you maybe that’s something you saw growing up again, from your parents.
Importance of Positive Money Association
We talked about that on day one. Maybe it’s something else you saw from earlier on in your life, life experiences, right? But that is not the point of the budget, the budget is not to limit you, it’s setting the intention of where you want your money to go. And with the Play account, we want money to be able to have fun in spending. So, how does that work? Right?
The reason why the Play account is so important, though, is because we do have to impulse spend. We have to create that positive money Association. We have to enjoy the process along the way.
This is my big thing with like, no spin challenges, we can get into the mindset of like how you JoJo finance when you do all those things. But yes, you’re working to improve. But if you realize that you can enjoy the process along the way that there’s nowhere to, quote, get to, you’re going to be a heck of a lot happier in life. And that’s something that we talk a lot about.
We’re going to get a little bit into that next time on the fifth part of this series. But we have to create that positive Positive Money Association. We just didn’t need to do it the right way.
But it goes back to we’re focusing on on what we want. Just like we don’t focus on the negative with the debt payoff. We switch that; we focus on the net worth. We’re focusing on the things that we want to do more up. We’re just doing it in a smart manner, right? Tactical how-tos.
Implementing Percentage-Based Budgeting
What the heck is the Play account? How does this work? Now, if you’ve been listening for a while you probably heard if not, I completely recommend percentage-based budgeting for both your personal business budget in your business budget. And Profit First is a very popular percentage based budgeting for the business side.
I don’t really recommend a profit first because it’s too complicated for most people that I talked to. But that’s a story for another day. Anyways, percentage-based budgeting, I will include links for my two budgeting systems Budgeting Simplified on the personal side and Prosperity Simplified on the business side.
If you get Prosperity Simplified, Budgeting Simplified comes as a bonus because as an entrepreneur, you need to focus on both personal and business budgeting. Okay, links will be in the show notes if you want to check that out.
Regardless, percentage-based budgeting and why is percentages budgeting so golden, okay. So it was a problem with inconsistent income. I was married to somebody in the trucking industry, and he was paid by the mile for the longest time percentage of a load like it’s very inconsistent income.
And then of course, you know, I’m an entrepreneur, that’s a little bit of inconsistent income. But even when I was working in insurance, we were salary plus commission, inconsistent income when your income fluctuates, percentage-based budgeting is even more vital. But regardless if you are somebody whose income somehow does not fluctuate, because I think most of us have this percentage-base budgeting is golden, because it’s designed to scale with you.
So hopefully, your incomes growing. That’s the goal that we have, right, and we’re going to talk more about that next time in the next part of the series. But as your income growth grows, so do your percentage, so do your percentages. So you’re prioritizing all the things that you want to prioritize in a systemized scalable way.
So, brief overview, we have eight-ish categories. We talk about this inside Money Mastery Academy, but you can take and leave some of these categories. But these are the main ones, okay. We’ve got fixed necessities.
These are like your bills, rent, mortgage, electricity, phone, Bill internet, those things, insurance that don’t really change, they stay pretty consistent. Now I know our electricity bills, fluctuate a little bit, but there’s still a fixed necessity.
Then we have very necessities, that’s groceries, gas, household stuff this can be but depending on how much you’re spending, we’re not really going to get into the differences with every necessities, annual expenses, but those are your very necessities that we have you’re giving. This can be like Cost of Goods Sold done through your business, hopefully, you know, 10 cents on every dollar that’s given into the company here it goes to fight against child sex trafficking, with Operation Underground Railroad, maybe you’re giving a tithe to your church, whatever that might be given category.
We have savings category I added a couple years ago was health because I wanted to see what we were spending specifically on our health, we do a lot of natural things, supplements, etc. Wanted to see those specific numbers, then you have financial freedom account, your financial freedom account is not used for businesses that you are actively involved in this is for passive income streams. So this business here is not funded by my financial freedom account, because I’m still active in this business, okay.
Education, education is used for you. So if you are still funding your business, from your personal finances, this is where it comes from the education category. This also can be used for personal development, you know, professional development, if you want to go back to school, any of those things, and the gold education category is to continue to improve you because if something happens, and you lost it all tomorrow, what you know, is the part that can’t take away from me, right?
All right, the fun play account. So there’s eight categories, depending on what you take and choose you could eliminate some of those if you wanted to, in the playground. That’s what we’re here to talk about.
So you have those main categories. And what that does is when you get your paycheck, you have we talked about how to set this all up Money Mastery Academy or the standalone courses. You have to check and you have to calculate the percentages, there’s a system software, all those things, okay? And then it gives you the amount that’s designated for the Play account. Okay?
So within the Play account, that’s where you had the blow money accounts, his money to blow her money to blow if you are married, we can do this. There’s a couple of ways like this set this up like true separate accounts, okay, but you have two funds there, right?
Your money. That’s like where you get your money to do whatever the heck you want with as long as it’s legal, legal, moral and ethical. This is what you get to N polston. You also can include within the Play account, you know, fun money dining out as a family those things, but all of that money there.
It’s based off the percentage and then you have that to split, you can put this like in, you can pull it out cash, if you’d rather have cash for your boy money accounts, you can leave it in the account, you can put it in a separate account, we’ll maybe I’ll do a separate like pro step on a simplified version of that here. Next episode, let me know if that would be helpful. But when you have that, in the account, you can go do whatever you want, at the convenience store or buy the big ticket item, if you’ve waited for 24 hours, when you have the money in the fund.
Personal Experience with the Play Account
It’s obvious to see like that freedom that you have to go spend and have good boundaries. This is so key, and there’s so much power in it. So a couple years ago, we I was getting ready to do a date night with my husband, you know, we had that set up. And we had drive ahead of the goal the time you know, we were going to do more consistent day nights, all those things, and it was like, “okay, hey, we were gonna get to go out. Hey, babe, like, where do you want to go? What do you want to do?” And he was like, “Well, I don’t know, like, I don’t know what we have to spend any of those things.”
So I pulled up the Play account, and took a screenshot. And we had over $600, specifically in the Play Account. Now granted, I think we had done, like less fun stuff a little bit before. So there was a month rollover.
I know that is a term you might not necessarily know again, that comes from the budgeting. But there have been a little bit that had built up. But we had $600 to go do whatever the heck we wanted to for like a date night.
Consistency is Key
Granted, I don’t think we really spent any of it maybe like dinner, and that was about it. But we had that option. Because we had put these things in place. And we stuck with it. That’s the key.
We’re gonna get into that more next time on like how you do that portion of it. But you have to stick with it, you have to be consistent. And I know it can be hard, especially setting up the system that like in between paychecks that account can dip a little lower, and we’ve got strategies to help with that like to overcome those obstacles and put those things in place. But the key was like we stuck with it consistently.
So then we were able to have that money to spend on fun. All right, so that’s your Play account. It’s your fun specifically to go spend money and it works. When you set up the percentage-based budgeting and you have that there. That’s a designated space for you to go have fun with your money.
So if you’re a spender, you’re doing that within the boundaries. And if you’re a saver, you have the money there to see like, this is something to go have fun with, we need to create that positive money Association, you have to do that portion. Okay. All right. That’s your Play account.
For fourth part on our guilt-free impulse spending. I’ll record a special like pro step simplified version of this, so make sure to watch for that. We have almost made it through our guilt-free impulse spending series. I don’t know, your action stuff today. Send me a message and let me know on Instagram what your biggest takeaway has been so far from this series. We’ll see you next time. Bye for now.
Taking Charge of Your Financial Wellness
You’re struggling with shame and guilt around your finances. Whether it’s debt impulse spending mistakes from the past, or the fact that you still haven’t hit your income goal, then it’s time for you to work with me. There are different levels of support and price points that you can use on the path to removing that guilt and shame so you can step into your unstoppable life.
After all, your finances are unique to you and your support should be to go to workwithaimee.com to get started with one of my most popular programs, or you can book a q&a call with me. We’ll figure out what your next step should be. And of course, all those links are hanging out in the show notes as well.
