🍁 Cozy Fall Budget Reset with Me (Fall Finance Ideas!)

it is officially October and I thought this is the perfect opportunity to go in clean up my budget and take a look at how things are shaping up for the fall the holidays um I'm expecting another baby at the end into December there's a lot going on and so I find when I'm feeling financially chaotic going back to the budget is just the thing that helps me maintain a sense of control so let's hop over to my office and we'll get things [Music] going okay so we are going inside of my quick and simplify budget if you have been following the channel for years then you probably know I have been using simplify in conjunction with my written budget this is just a really easy way for me to quickly scan for transactions on the go and right now quick and simplify is 40% off for a limited time just in time for holiday season budgeting and planning so if you're interested in adding quick and simplify to your financial routine click the link in the description box below to get that discount and what I'm doing here is I'm just doing a quick cleanup of my September budget because I noticed some things needed to either increase in my budget expense or just recategorize them even though the software will automatically categorize things for you sometimes it gets it wrong I mean it that just happens so right here I'm actually redoing my energy bill so reworking that and said it's not it was labeled as groceries but it's not it's my electric bill so I'm making sure that it's correctly marked as a bill and I just love that they have these progress bars to quickly tell me what areas I'm over budget and what areas still have money left over also one quick thing when I was looking into restaurants I noticed that there were a couple transactions that did not belong there yes they were technically restaurants but they were actually from Kyle's work expense so what you can do is you can highlight multiple expenses hit category hit edit and then categorize that as in my case work expenses you can also do this for vacations I love doing that so I can denote which expenses were for vacations and which ones were just normal eating out in my local [Music] city and here's where I'm mentioning a about denoting things for Vacations so you can actually create specific tags or categories for particular vacations which is really great about simplify you can actually customize all of your expenses so that it works for your life I'm also going into other spending there's over $3,000 in other spending what is it we're going to find out so what I like to do is go through other spending make sure they're categorized correctly and if it's something that actually needs to be a budgeted planned spending item then I make sure that it goes over into planned spending and gets out of other spending Kyle and I recently took a trip to Manhattan Kansas where we both went to school we went to a football game it's showing tuition it's because we bought ice cream on campus but we're going to go ahead and just categorize those as our Manhattan trip and then just going in and cleaning up all around I would say this probably took me about 45 minutes in total to just go through review my budget and start planning ahead so by no means does this have to take you hours and hours of work to do this I could literally sit watch Netflix and start categorizing things and making a plan for my money so I'm just going through other spending I'm noticing $615 of just kid stuff that wasn't planned it is planned it's actually a bill so anytime I saw that transaction for $280 $250 I knew that that was a bill so that's why I'm moving those things out of there so I can get it out of other spending that's kind of my goal is just to make sure that the bulk of my money is going towards planned spending and getting out of other spending all right so if you guys hadn't heard we bought our first house in June and we are just now getting a lot of our first utilities uh bills and so this one I'm actually starting to create a recurring bill for our waste water I had no idea that water and then waste water were build separately they're also build every 2 months I actually got on the phone with the Wastewater facility and I was like how does this work so I'm making sure that the water bill gets added as a every other Bill to my budget which is really nice that simplify lets you just categorize and customize how often your build on these things and then if ever it's showing that you missed a bill then you can go ahead and Link it to a transaction that's already [Music] happened so now I'm taking a look ahead for fall making sure that I have my plan spending under control that I know exactly what bills are allocated for and just thinking about okay what's happening in October October are there some fun things that I want to do like fall festivals we've got Halloween coming up do I have money set aside for things like costumes and candy and Halloween decorations typically I like to do those things as part of my shopping expense and to me that kind of makes sense there but you could totally make a separate budget for like October Halloween like fun festivity expenses you can make it as custo iable as you want so I'm just kind of going through my plan spending to take a look at okay what budgets need to increase if I if needed thinking about things like gifts cuz I had a lot of October birthdays in our family there's like five October birthdays of immediate family members which is kind of crazy so I'm making sure that that is accounted for as well I'm also decreasing my travel budget and then I noticed that there's a lot of income after bills and saving and so I'm like wait a second my mortgage is missing from my budget so now I'm going on the hunt to make sure that that mortgage payment is actually categorized correctly as one of my bills so I'm going to go in and sech under bills and payments and take a look at where it's located so I see simplify is actually showing this as a transfer which makes sense I do transfer that money over from my primary Bank to the mortgage lender who just so happens to be my primary bank so I want to make sure that I'm creating this as a recurring series to ensure that the the app is going to actually categorize this correctly for [Music] me okay so user error on my part because I still didn't see it show up but I did add the bill directly into my September budget and then I noticed that it was excluded from my spending and my reports so I made sure that it was not excluded and that you could actually see it so I'm making sure that in October I'm also showing okay hey we need to actually make sure this is not excluded this is part of my bill and I think it was just flagging that as not a bill because again it was just showing it as a transfer so you'll want to just ensure that you catch some of those nuances just to ensure that things are actually being subtracted from your budget appropriately so you know how much money is left over for plan spending and savings all right over here I want to check out my spending watch lists all of these watch lists I created just to help me get a better understanding of how I'm spending my money month to month and then what I love about simplify that you just can't get anywhere else is the reporting feature it shows you your monthly averages your year to date how much you spent so far this month what are some things that you have actually spent money on and it gives you an itemized report of all of those things now I did mention that I had an insane month of expenses that were dedicated to shopping but I know that some of those shopping excursions like Amazon Target some of those things included groceries home repairs home upgrades so if that's you and you're like I just need to figure out what what I spent my money on you can actually go into some of these separate transactions and make little notes of what you spent money on because I don't know about you but having multiple Amazon transactions and then seeing the dollar amounts doesn't really tell me exactly what I bought so typically and I need to do a better job of this is when I buy something on Amazon immediately go into simplify make a note of what I bought and then categorize it into the appropriate category after watch list I want to move us over to goals because setting the budget for fall and for the holidays means I want to make sure that I am set up for Christmas that I have enough money for Christmas which I've been saving for year round but simplify is going to help me figure out exactly how much more money I need to save in order to get there I want $1,500 the reason I know I want want $1,500 is because I've been dragging my budget for a very long time I know how much I spent on Christmas last year so that's why I'm creating that as a particular goal so that I make sure that I'm set up for the holidays and I don't have to sweat I'm heading over to the November budget and making sure that I increase some categories like groceries I know I'm going to be hosting Thanksgiving this year we need to increase the grocery budget that is totally okay and that's how I can make adjustments and pivots to my budget so that it's not the same it doesn't have to be the same every single month this is how we pivot also it reminded me I'm getting closer to my due date my baby is due at the end of December so I want to make sure I set up a little fund for baby number two whether that's extra pacifiers or diapers or just stuff that I need for a newborn and newborn life I'm going to set that up as a goal now when you set up a goal and simplify it doesn't actually move the money for you you still have to do that between your financial accounts this is a a way to hold you accountable and to show you that you're actually making progress and then you'll have to ensure that whenever you make those transfers that you link that up as part of your savings goals also Home Improvement got its own spending plan I I want to make sure that I roll over this is an important feature if you want to roll over any unused cash you can this is how syncing funds are addressed so so anytime that you spend money from there or you don't spend money that money just automatically rolls over into the next month's budget so I've addressed Christmas I've addressed Thanksgiving Halloween and making sure that I increase the budgets where they they're needed and making sure everything is set up correctly don't forget that quick and simplify is offering 40% off for a limited time for their app just in time for holiday season budgeting and planning this is a great tool click the link in the description box below to access that 40% off coupon and thank you so much to quick and simplify for partnering with me on this video [Music]