Do This EVERY TIME You Get Paid (Payday Routine)

Transcript:

On this episode of the personal finance podcast, do this every single time you get paid. Let's get into the payday routine. What's

up everybody. And welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of mastermoney. co. And today on the personal finance podcast, we are going to be talking about the payday routine. If you guys have any questions. Make sure to hit us up on Instagram, Tik TOK, Twitter at master money co and follow us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on.

And if you want to help out the show, and I would love if you would want to help out the show, consider leaving that five star rating and review. Can I. Thank you guys enough for leaving those five star ratings and reviews. They truly mean the world to us and really, really helps us, uh, spread this message about building wealth to other people.

Now, today we are going to be diving into what you should be doing every time you get paid. We're going to get into the payday routine because we've never done an episode on this. And I think overall, a lot of people get confused as to what they need to do each time they get paid. Maybe it's Friday, and you get paid, and all of a sudden you go out and you buy a brand new pair of shoes, then maybe you go out to a restaurant, then you go to the movies with your friends, and then boom!

All of a sudden, all of your money is gone. You have no idea where your money went. Well, let me tell you a little story. Because early on, when I had my first real job, this was a major problem for me. Every time I would get paid, I didn't track anything whatsoever, and I would go out, and I would just start spending money.

I would go get the groceries. I would go down the street and go to the bars with a couple of my friends. Then I would go and play some golf and I would just do all these little things. And over time, what would happen is I would get to the end of the month and I'd be like, where the heck did all my money go?

And I'm sure a lot of you who have never tracked your money have felt this feeling before you get paid and then your money disappears and you get paid and your money disappears. This is called living paycheck to paycheck. Now we have an entire episode coming up talking about how to break this paycheck to paycheck cycle, but what I'm going to tell you today is a routine that you can utilize so that this does not continue to happen to you.

Because folks who do not plan for these big things, never will be able to build wealth. You need to be able to plan for this stuff. And I'm going to give you some tips and tricks on why this is really important. Now, there are two different options here. One of the options is you can take physical action, meaning every time you get paid, you can take physical action on all these things we're about to talk about, and you can do these and do these manually.

Or you can automate this process and you know, your boy is the money automation guy. And so overall, you can also automate this process when it comes to automating this process. It makes this seamless where you set all of this stuff up once and then you don't have to do it again. You just have to monitor it and tweak it if you want to.

If your pay changes or anything along those lines. So this is something where it really, really does make a huge difference to automate this process, which we will talk about over time. And, you know, as we progress through this, we are working on an automation course and that automation course is going to give you the exact steps.

I'm going to show you exactly sharing my screen and everything that I do on my entire automation process. So that is coming within the next couple of months. Now, this routine is going to make you really wealthy. If you follow it, if you can follow this routine, it is really going to help you on that journey.

But you have to be consistent and consistency is the key when it comes to building wealth. I'm not saying consistency is a difficult thing. We can make it very easy with automation, but consistency is the key. Wealth is built with simple, but consistent systems. Let me say that again. Wealth is built with simple, but consistent.

System. So you don't have to have some complicated spreadsheet. You don't have to have some complicated system every time you get paid. You just need to have a system running that is consistent over time. So first, what we're going to do is we're going to dive into step one, and we are going to talk through some of the pre paycheck stuff you need to figure out before you get your next paycheck, so that when it comes in, you know exactly what you are going to be doing with it.

Because this is really, really important overall. So without further ado, let's get into it. All right. So the first thing we are going to be doing. Is we are going to find our baseline and we're going to utilize what I like to call the B F F method. Now, what does the BFF method stand for? The B stands for your baseline.

And we'll talk about your baseline here in a second. The F stands for fun and the other F stands for future. So future you is the third F. Now this is really, really important to understand because this is going to give you your allocation of what you want to do in life. And so you have to think through this a little bit.

Now, the first step, figuring out your baseline is the most important thing. If you're a person who lives paycheck to paycheck, this is a huge thing that you need to understand, but every person listening to this podcast, and I mean every single person, I don't care how much money you make, you need to know what your baseline number is.

What does that mean? What is your baseline number? Your baseline number is your essential expenses. So even when you automate your money, you still have to know your baseline number and these essential expenses. Well, what the heck are essential expenses? Overall, this is going to be things like your housing, for example.

So housing should be 30 percent or less of your income being spent. And if you want to really start to build wealth, get 25 percent or below. And if you want to become financially independent in 10 years or less, I believe you need to have 20. percent or less of your income spent on housing. Then it's also utilities.

We got to have the lights on. We got to have the water running. We got to have the gas lines going. All of those things are essential to your living. Then we have food. So mainly groceries. I want you to calculate groceries into this, unless you really have a zero idea how to cook whatsoever, and you only can live on.

You know, Taco Bell or whatever else you eat, then that's a different story. But food, the essentials for me is groceries. It is not eating out. You can learn how to cook. It is very easy. You can YouTube some of this stuff. Groceries are essential. Eating out is not essential. Then we have healthcare.

Healthcare is Obviously essential. So making sure we pay our health insurance premiums. We have enough money for out of pocket costs for prescriptions or any other ongoing medical costs that we have out there. Then we have transportation. You got to get from point a to point B in order to make some money.

Unless you have a work from home job, transportation is absolutely essential. If you do have a work from home job, I would consider transportation to Be essential if you live in an area where you have to get around with transportation. But if you live in New York City, then transportation is not essential.

You can either walk to where you need to get to go and some of this stuff could kind of factor in. And then lastly, you have debt obligations. So when it comes to debt obligations, you need to make sure that you are paying some of these debt obligations on time and you're paying at least the minimum payments such as debts on your student loans, maybe your credit cards or other personal loans.

So those minimum payments Actually need to be in your essential expenses so that you don't fall behind on these and have some major issues come up financially. These are squeezed into your essentials. These are things that you absolutely need to know. Now you can say to yourself, once I know these essential expenses, I know I need to have at least this amount every single month, no matter what available to be able to pay this stuff.

So this number is really, really important to know. Now, where do these essential expenses flow through? So what's going to happen here is that when you get paid, obviously you have direct deposit going into your checking account. Now, let me explain something about a checking account to a lot of people. I do not want you saving money in your checking account.

The reason is your checking account is just an account that flows money in and it flows money out. This is a spending account. It is an account that all it is there to do is to spend money. So money is supposed to come into it. And then you allocate those dollars. Everywhere else they need to go. You tell your money what to do.

So the only money you really want to leave in there is your essential expenses, and then the other dollars that you may spend later on. And so we can calculate what those numbers are later on, but your baseline numbers, that baseline that you have, is most important. You know that number is always going to be inside of your checking account, okay?

So this is exactly where that falls into. Now one other thing about your essential expenses before we go forward is when it comes to your essential expenses, you have to ask yourself a couple of different questions and you need to understand this because this is really going to tell you are you living paycheck to paycheck or not.

And this is going to tell you what you need to do next if your essential expenses are right on the line. So first you have to ask yourself how much is left over. And this is the huge, huge indicator on your financial situation. If you have nothing left over after your bare bones, essential expenses, meaning your baseline expenses, you have nothing left over or you have very little left over.

And to me, very little is, you know, one, two, 300 left over after that, then we have what we call an income problem. Now your income is the catalyst to building wealth. Your income can absolutely change your life if you learn how to raise your income and then take that extra income and put it towards wealth building activities.

You know why? Because when you do that, that creates freedom in your life. And you can become financially free if you just take the gap between your expenses and your income and you put them towards your freedom. If you didn't know that yet, You can actually invest your dollars towards your freedom. And that's what retirement accounts are.

That's what we do. We invest our money in the stock market is we're investing our money towards our freedom. That means we value our freedom. We value our time so that we can spend the time doing what we love with our family, our friends, and everybody else in our lives. This is the power that you have with your income.

But if you're sitting there at the end of the month and you say to yourself, I have no money left over. It's not like I'm balling out and I'm buying a brand new car. It's not like I'm going out there and I'm spending all this money on frivolous things. I'm just getting the bare bone expenses done and I have no money left over.

What am I doing wrong? If this is you, if you're saying this to yourself, let me tell you, A, there is hope for you, B, your boy is going to help you out through this entire process, and C, you have an income problem. Your income problem is a huge factor. So, you can do a number of different things here, and we'll talk about this more in the Paycheck to Paycheck Cycle episode, but you can do a lot more here.

And raising your income is going to be the number one thing that I want you to focus your time and energy on. And that may mean that you need to invest in yourself. That may mean that you need to go out and get a better job that pays more. That may mean you need to negotiate your salary. There's options out there that we will talk through in that episode.

But if you are in those two categories where you have nothing left over or very little left over, we need to raise your income. And if you have a negative amount left over, we have a real pants on fire emergency, and we need to get that income raised immediately. Either with a second job would be the first thing I would tell you to do, because you need to get that baseline income, even with your baseline expenses.

So that's really, really important overall to do. And if that's you, then we need to get that going. Now, if you are cashflow positive, meaning that you get these baseline expenses done, you have money left over. Then overall, we're going to go on to the next step. So the next section that we're going to be doing is we are now, our paycheck comes in, we're going to be paying ourself first.

Now you've heard your boy talk about this all the time. You need to pay yourself first. And some of the best financial gurus of all time, like Warren Buffett, for example, always say the. Best thing to do is to pay yourself first. The richest man in Babylon, which is a fantastic book says you always got to pay yourself first.

The millionaire next door surveyed a bunch of millionaires and they all say you got to pay yourself first. And over and over and over people say this beat. Why do people say this over and over and over again? It is the most important thing you can do if you want financial freedom is to pay yourself first.

Now a lot of people will get snarky with me when I say this and they will say, Oh, I'm not going to pay my bills. I'm just going to pay myself first. That's not what I'm saying here. If your baseline expenses are the same with your income, obviously you got to take care of your expenses, which is why I talked about that first.

But then after that, we're going to pay ourselves first. So the first thing we are going to do is we're going to automate money into savings. So. If you do not have any sort of emergency fund or buffer or whatsoever, then we're going to try to save 5, 000 as fast as we can. Now, this is really, really important overall, because this is going to protect your wealth building process as you go through these next steps.

And so that is the first place I want you to take some of this excess cash is put it towards an emergency fund. And if you don't have any emergency fund whatsoever, the buffer account is going to be that first 5, 000. After that first 5, 000, then we're going to try to build that emergency fund up to six months, but we're going to go to the next step first before we do that.

So making sure that you get this and protect yourself is going to be really, really important because how many times have you started? Uh, maybe you started the new year or something like that and you started to save up money and then all of a sudden life just smacks you right in the face. Your tires.

All four of them blow at the same time. And then at the same time, it also seems like you have a bunch of issues with your house. Then your job doesn't give you enough hours that you need. There's all these kinds of things that will kind of add up altogether. And it seems like when it rains, it pours the old saying when it rains, it pours that absolutely always happens when it comes to your money.

So making sure you have this money set aside is going to protect you from life. Cause life is going to happen. It's not, if life is going to happen, it's when life is going to happen. And having that cash buffer is going to protect you. That's the next place I want you to put your money is in that cash buffer.

Then we have high interest debt. And so high interest that if you have any of that debt, then it needs to automate and flow into extra payments on your high interest debt. So you're taking care of that baseline debt. Obviously, right off the top, that is part of your baseline expenses where it's your minimum payments.

But then after that, we also need to make extra payments towards high interest debt. So if you have credit cards that are high interest debt, anything above 6%, uh, credit cards, student loans, any of this kind of stuff, we need to take care of that next, uh, and move from there. And then we jump in investments.

So if you want to, you know, know the order of investments that we talked about, always, we have something called the stairway to wealth. Uh, and it explains all of this. We just did the 3. 0 version recently. So you can check out that episode. We will link it up in the show notes down below this so that you can check that out.

And that's where some of these things are coming from is that stairway to wealth. But as we go through this process, you're going to see there's going to be some differences in what you should do with your paycheck as we go along. But when it comes to investments, I love this order. I love. Roth IRA and in tandem with that, if you have a high deductible health plan, I like the HSA.

Then I love the 401k and then I love taxable brokerage account. So following that order is going to be really, really important. If you are someone who is out there trying to get started investing. Now, if you have a really, really high income and. You are in the 30 percent tax bracket or higher. You may want to consider doing the 401k or the pre tax account prior to a Roth.

But if you are in that income bracket, then I would definitely have a CPA in my corner and I would have my CPA look at that situation and tell me what is going on. Really great investment for you overall. Now after we go through our investments, all of our investments should be automated. All of our payments to that high interest debt should be automated.

All of the money going into our high yield savings account, if we're doing a cash buffer should be automated. Then what we're going to do, Is we are going to save the rest of our money. So we do all of these things. We're hitting our money goals. We're hitting our savings goals. We're hitting our investment goals that we want to hit.

And it doesn't mean you have to max out those accounts. It means that you have to hit the goals based on what you want to hit in retirement. Then you can save the rest of your money. When I mean save the rest of your money, I'm saying a. Let's build up that emergency fund, but then beyond that, let's save for a down payment on a house.

Let's save for our wedding fund. Let's save for a down payment on a car. Let's save for any big ticket item we want to do. Okay? And let's start saving that money. Now, where do you save this money? A lot of times I utilize a high yield savings account. There's a bunch of them out there I like. I like Ally Bank because it has savings buckets.

I always talk about Ally. I have zero affiliation with Ally. I don't have an affiliate link with them. I just like them. They're just pretty good. So overall, I like their little savings buckets because you can budget inside there and you can automate right into those savings buckets. But if you don't like that, you can do whatever you want.

Just get it into a high yield savings account. Why? Because high yield savings accounts pay you higher interest than your standard savings account at Chase Bank or Wells Fargo or Bank of America or whatever big brick and mortar bank is down the street from you. A high yield savings account is going to pay you more money.

And so I like more money. I don't know if you like more money, but I love to have more money. That's why I like to save my money in high yield savings accounts. So for example, like right now, the interest rates are like at a four and a half percent interest rate. And if you have 15, 000 bucks into a high yield savings account, you're going to have like 50 bucks a month that is going to pay you extra.

So you get an extra 50 bucks a month. That's going to compound over time. And you're going to see this money grow over time. So make sure you get in those high yield savings accounts. If you don't. We're going to come looking for you. Just kidding. No, we're not. But overall, I just think you really, really want to be able to do that because it's just going to get you free money.

And I want all of you to get as much free money as possible. I want to make it rain free money in your life. Okay, next one. Then once we start to hit those savings goals, we're getting really happy about these savings goals. Then we get to start to spend our dollars. And so spending your money is the other F.

So we have Obviously the baseline, the BFF is baseline expenses. Then we have our future expenses, which is going to be those investments. It's going to be that emergency fund. It's going to be honestly, I even see vacations as a future investment because that's a mental health vacation anyway. So there's a lot of cool things that you can put under future.

You paying down debt is a future you. So all of those are future. And then we have the other F. What's the other F? The other F is fun. Yeah. We have to like to have a little fun here. So we're going to have some fun when it comes to our third F our fun expenses. Now there's a lot of things that fall into the fun category.

Uh, overall, this is going to be things like. Going to restaurants, getting Netflix, getting drinks with friends, going and getting a facial, going and doing hot yoga. I don't know what the list goes on and on and on of what you might do. I don't know what you do, whatever your interests are, whatever you have fun doing, that's what goes under this category.

So it's all those things that really are not essential to your life that you. Do not need, but you want to have them in there because life is so much more fun when you have those things. Now, I like to prioritize these things. There's one thing I want to make really, really clear here. It comes later on in the steps, but I like to prioritize these things.

I want you to be able to spend more dollars on fun. More dollars on fun is really, really important. So you're seeing I'm not really allocating budgeting percentages. So there's a famous budgeting percentage thing. Uh, it's called the 50 30 20 rule and who actually developed this was Elizabeth Warren, the Senator Elizabeth Warren and the 50 30 20 rule States that you spend 50 percent on your essential expenses or your baseline expenses, or what I'm kind of calling this, then you're spending 30 percent on fun and 20 percent on all of your other stuff, like your investments, paying down debt, all this other stuff.

My argument with that is that 20 percent is not enough, especially if you're in debt, it's not enough to be able to pay down that debt and invest enough money so that you can become wealthy. That's my problem with that. So there's a fine line between the 50, the 30 and the 20, where you can adjust some of these numbers.

Maybe your baseline expenses are only 40 percent of your income. And then you have. 30 percent for fun, and then you have 30 percent for your future. You, maybe you spend 20 percent for fun because you're in a specific season of life where you need to spend that specific 20 percent for fun. You need to tail that down a little bit.

Maybe you have kids in daycare. Maybe your essential expenses are rising really fast. Then that 30 percent of fun is going to have to go down to 20. It's going to have to go down to 15. I don't know what it's going to have to go down to, but there is ways to be able to spend more on fun. And it is increasing your income.

Income, again, is the catalyst to getting anything you want in life, as long as you take that income and you put it towards things you actually value. And so why it's so important to know your values. That's why we made Master Your Money Goals. Uh, is because we want you to be able to understand what you value and be able to put it towards the things that you value.

So, overall, this is a big, big thing that I want you to understand. Is I want you to learn how to spend more money on fun, but it takes a little planning with your paychecks to be able to do that. Now, Spending is a great thing, and I've spent a lot more money than I used to in the last couple of years.

And the reason for that is because I've realized that spending is also something I want to do. I want to spend more money on things that I like to do, and I want that for you as well. But increasing your income is going to be the big thing. So overall, that's a really, really big piece is to do it in this order so that you know where you stand and you can build well first.

Then you can figure out what is that percentage I need leftover for fun They don't want you to kind of reflect on this stuff as you go through this. I want you to go through reflections and I want you to say to yourself, am I happy with where this is landing? And each paycheck is coming in. I'm kind of looking at this.

Am I happy where my dollars are landing or am I extremely unhappy with how my life is going right now, especially when it comes to my money? Because money is just a tool to give you the life that you want. So money does not increase happiness. Money decreases anxiety around money, which can help increase happiness.

But money. Also can give you time freedom, which is really, really important, which leads me to the bonus step, which we will get to right after this break. All right. So step seven is a really fun one because I like to spend money on convenience. It's actually one of my favorite things to spend money on overall.

And there is this great book, uh, by Dan Martell called buy back your time. And it came out as of recent, I need to get in touch with Dan, get them on the podcast. But overall, uh, buy back. Your time is a really, really interesting book that kind of will. Open up your eyes. Now, my eyes were originally open to this in a book called the four hour work week, which is a book by someone named Tim Ferriss.

If you'd never heard of Tim Ferriss, he hosts the Tim Ferriss podcast. He also does a number of different things, but he kind of originated the idea in my mind, at least of you need to buy back your time. And so if you have money left over after you do all of these things, maybe you have some additional cash, you're hitting your investment goals and you're on pace to do what you want to do with those investment goals, then buying back your time is a great use of your paycheck and your paycheck routine, because what this is going to do is allow you to have more time back to do the stuff that you want to do.

So you can throw this under fun if you want, but I like to call it buy back your time so that you really, really see exactly what you're doing. So what is some examples of this? One of which is I used to always every single weekend have to take care of my lawn. And in my last house, I would, you know, be out there for five hours every single week, and I'd mow the lawn.

I'd edge the lawn. I'd pull the weeds. I'd make sure all the landscaping looks good. I lay mulch every quarter. I do all these different things to make sure everything is maintained. And it would take me about five hours every single week. Then I realized, well, I need to buy back this time because this is taking way too long.

The problem was I was a little too cheap to actually go and spend the money to have somebody do it. Finally, I bit the bullet when I had my first son, we started to actually buy back our time, hired a lawn care company. I got those five hours back and it was the best dollars I've ever spent in my entire life.

Let me tell you something. If you're a frugal weirdo out there and you will not spend money on getting your time back, let me tell you. I was in your position as well, and now I absolutely love every dollar I spend buying back our time. So lawn care is a great example. Pool care is another one now that I have done, uh, because I don't want to do it myself.

And then overall, there's so many different ways that you can add this back in your life. You can do this with an accountant, for example, so you don't have to do your taxes anymore. You can do this with budgeting. You can get a budgeting assistant or somebody along those lines who will help you do your budgeting.

If you hate budgeting, Have a budgeting assistant do it. Uh, you could do these things like grocery delivery. Walmart now has grocery delivery with their Walmart plus 99 bucks or whatever. And you just tip the driver is what your cost is. If you have that Walmart plus you could do this with all sorts of different things where you're buying back your time.

So you're not spending so much time doing things you hate. If there are things you hate and you can buy back your time, maybe you hate cleaning the house. You can get a house cleaner. Maybe you hate pressure washing the driveway. You Buy back your time by having somebody pressure wash your driveway. But the only way you can do this is if your income is high enough to cover all your expenses and cover all the things you want to do so that you can buy back that time.

And I love this part of money. Money is a tool that allows you to do this, to buy back your time. And the same thing goes for if you have a business. If you have a business, you can buy back your time and leverage your business activities by hiring people in your business to take care of some of the things that Do not produce income.

So income producing activities are things that I like to focus on in some of my other businesses. And I like to hire people to do the things that are not income producing activities. This means like bookkeeping, for example, not a huge income producing activity. If I can just go in there and review it and somebody else went in there and categorize transactions and help me through all that process.

So this is where you get leverage in life. You get leverage in life by buying back your time. And when you buy back your time, you can either use that time for more income producing activities or you can use that time for things that you actually value, like spending time with your family, things that along those lines, as you get to the end of your life, you're going to regret not spending time with your family.

And if you're spending all week long working your nine to five, or really it's an eight to nine, I get it overall. If you spend all your week doing that, and then on the weekends, you have to go outside and you have to mow your lawn, you have to take care of all that stuff, and you have to do all the grocery shopping, and you don't really get to spend that much quality time with your family, you're going to regret that later on in life.

And so, making sure that you have enough income coming in. So that you can take care of that is a really, really rewarding feeling. And a lot of times you have to work up to it. It's not going to happen right away. It took me years before I actually was able to do it, but you can work your way up to getting to that point in time.

You're investing for your financial future is more important and doing all these different things are way more important, but getting to the point where you can buy back your time. Wow. It is one. Amazing thing to do in life. So really, really want to encourage you guys to do that. We'll talk about kind of the steps to get there, uh, in a future episode where we can talk about buying back our time and all those steps that we need to take in order to get to that point in time.

And I'm going to show you some really cool ways to buy back your time as well, because I think this is something that most people really don't talk about in the personal finance community, but I think you should prioritize it. Because you can actually make more money doing so. So your income can actually increase.

And at the same time, it will also be something that will be really rewarding for you, especially when it comes to family, friends, and spending more time with the people that you love. So that's what we're all about here at the personal finance podcast is you building well, so you can spend more time doing the things you love with the people you love and having a more fulfilling life.

So. This is exactly what we talk about here. So listen, thank you guys so much for listening to this podcast episode. Can I thank you guys enough for investing in yourself? Because that is exactly what you did today by listening to this podcast episode. And if you guys ever have any questions, please reach out to me.

And let me know and we will, you know, do as much as we possibly can to answer those questions. Also, I'm going to start putting a survey down in the show notes for the automation course. And when this automation course comes out, I want to make sure that we cover everything that you guys want in that automation course.

So I'm going to ask a couple of questions. If you want to take time to answer that survey, you are more than welcome to, but I want to make sure we cover everything that you want to know about money automation. So no matter what your suggestion is, stick it in there. And we will work on making sure that that is covered in the money automation course.

So that as we go through this, we make sure that we have all bases covered. Cause I know what I want to talk about. We have a whole entire big outline for this, uh, really excited for this launch. This is going to be really, really fun. And I think it's going to change your life because it saves me so much time every single month and budgets are out.

Automation is in and this is going to be the best way to do this overall. So if you have any suggestions or anything that you want me to cover in there, I'm going to put just like a Google form maybe or something like that down below or some sort of survey maybe and you'll be able to check that out and just give me any feedback that you want.

Again, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode and we will see you on the next episode.

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