At the height of our crazy debt repayment and savings journey I had taken on four part-time jobs to bring in as much income as I could. I was substitute teaching in two different districts, waiting tables at a local restaurant and sometimes working the front desk, as well as working as a camp counselor type job for the parks and recreation district nearby. There were many challenges juggling so many different schedules and still finding time to relax and spend time with my husband. If you are in a similar situation where you are not only trying to balance work and life, but as well trying to figure out how to make a monthly budget when you have no idea how much money you will make in any given month, then this post is for you!
I created a system that not only helped me balance my work and free time, but also allowed for me to create a monthly budget that would work. Here are a few reasons why I NEEDED to do this!
1) As you have read before, I have a really hard time saying no to people. When you are substitute teaching in two districts, waiting tables and working the front desk at a restaurant with over 100 front of the house staff members, and working on-call as a youth supervisor, you literally have hundreds of people calling you on a regular basis offering to let you work. To someone who is working hard to get out of debt, this can seem like a Godsend, an unlimited ability to work and make money!! But on the flip side, there were times when I was working 7 days per week and running myself into the ground. When someone would call and offer me a job, I didn't want to turn it down because I could only imagine the money I was losing by saying no. Let alone, I felt bad for allowing myself to take a day off when my husband was gone at work.
2) I never knew how much money I was going to make and when I was going to get it. As a sub, I got paid once a month, from two districts, as a waitress I was paid every other week and daily in tips, and as the youth leader, I was also paid every other week. But each job also came with different rates of pay, and tips were always inconsistent. So how could I plan a budget with all of this uncertainty and instability?
3) As a server making daily tips, it gets really easy to just live day-by-day and not plan ahead to pay bills. Because if you get a bill in the mail, all you have to do is pick up a shift that night and you have it paid. It's hard to get out of that habit and to start looking ahead and creating a plan for your money.
So, these issues led me to creating a plan with my husband that took all of the stress off of me and led me to a little more freedom and the ability to make a stable contribution to our monthly budget and savings. John and I sat down, and after looking at our monthly expenses and our goals for debt repayment and savings, we came to the mutual agreement that I would bring in a bare minimum of $1,800 a month (after taxes). That wasn't a lot of money in comparison to what John was bringing in, but again, that was the absolute bare minimum to make our budget work. The next thing I did was to go through my pay stubs and figure out what I was bringing home after taxes per hour for each position I was working. I laid each position out in a spreadsheet with the hourly take home rate, and used the equation software to set it up so that when I entered the number of hours I worked, it would show how much I had brought in. I am not good with excel, but I figured it out after a lot of trial and error! Here is what it looked like:
Sarah's Income:
Sub Full Day-$140:
Sub Half Day-$70:
Server-$7:
Front Desk-$9:
Park & Rec-$11:
Tips-:
Total:
Then all I had to do was to plug in any hours I worked that day, or any tips I made, and it magically told me my running balance for the month and added it up at the bottom. Another thing I had to do to make this work was to get a small calendar and keep track of my paydays. If I knew that any hours I put in on March 26th wouldn't be paid until April 11th, I would put those hours on the April spreadsheet instead of March. ( I had a basic sheet that I just made a copy of for each month) So you need to keep track of when you will actually receive the money you are earning. If all of this computer stuff sounds way too complicated, then you for sure could do this on paper with a pencil and a calculator. Whichever way works best for you, as long as you keep up on it! What this spreadsheet did for me was for me to keep track of what I was bringing in for any given month, and allow me to evaluate each day whether I NEEDED to work that day, or whether I could afford to take the day off. For example, if I woke up one morning and just felt the need to stay in my pajamas and read a good book, and I was able to see in my spreadsheet that it was only the middle of the month, but I had already brought in $1,500, I would allow myself to take the day off. This made me feel less guilty for sitting at home...because in reality, John was able to take his weekends off every week and didn't feel guilty, so why was I feeling that way just because I had the opportunity to work, but didn't?
The other thing that using this spreadsheet did for me, was it finally made me accountable for my tips!!! I had to make the mental shift that my tips were now part of my FAMILY income, and that each penny needed to be accounted for. In the past, whenever I took a break at work, or maybe aftrer my shift was over, I would order some food off the menu at half price (what a deal, right?) and eat! It usually cost about $5, but when I made $100 that night, it was no big deal. But when you add that up, that is $5 a day, 5 days per week...that's $100 a month!! That is a whole day's work!! I justified it to myself because it was only a few dollars, but if John were to spend $5 a day on lunch everyday we would probably nip that in the bud. So it wasn't okay for me to do either. After doing this I started taking advantage of the free soup and bread my restaurant offered the employees, and I would often bring a sandwich and some fruit and other snacks with me to make my own lunch. I needed to make sure that any tips I made that day were going toward our household budget, and if I decided to treat myself on my break or after my shift, that it was deducted from my "blow" money or somewhere else in our budget.
This type of system and mentality can work for any person working a job that has a variable income or works for comission. Just find the bare bones minimum amount of money you need to make that month and aim toward that number. Anything extra (and I always made more than $1,800 a month) would be put toward savings!! I loved those shifts where I was able to tell myself while I was serving some horribly obnoxious guest that I was doing it for ME and not to pay someone else!!! I would chuckle to myslef and say, "you are giving me money for just brining you food, what an idiot!" LOL. It was a whole new mentality when I had clear goals and I was no longer a slave to my lender.
Here is one last tidbit to encourage you to change your ways, especially if you hate your job, like I did: Imagine that you go and buy yourself a brand new TV (because you work hard and deserve it) and you take them up on the offer of 0% financing for 90 days. Even if you pay it off within the 90 days, you are still forking over several hundred dollars a month to pay off that TV. You are going to work, and busting your butt, to pay some cheeseball in a suit at Best Buy headquarters...no fun! Whereas, you instead decide to save up for a TV, and instead of going to work everyday to pay back some cheeseball, you now bring home that several hundred dollars a month and watch it collect on your dresser in cash until you can walk into that same store and pay for it in cash!! In the second scenario, you are working for YOU, not for someone else...its a liberating feeling!!!
Till next time,
Sarah
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