The Bucket Method For Managing Your Savings (Master Multiple Savings Goals)

Transcript:

On this episode of the personal finance podcast, the bucket method for managing and organizing your savings.

Everybody welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew founder of master money. co and today on the personal finance podcast, we're gonna be diving into the bucket method. For managing and organizing your savings. If you guys have any questions, make sure to join us on the master money newsletter by going to master money.

co slash newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and YouTube. And if you're getting value out of this show, consider leaving a five star rating and review. Now in today's episode. I'm going to show you how to manage the bucket method for organizing your savings. And what we're going to talk about today is a number of different things.

First, we're gonna talk about what the bucket method is. Then we're going to be talking through how to create your savings buckets. Then I'm going to talk through actually how to organize. Automate your savings so that you do not have to lift a finger. You can set up an automated system that allows you to save effortlessly.

Then we're going to talk about managing multiple savings goals. Cause a big question we always get here is how do I manage multiple savings goals? I want to save for a house. I want to save for a car. I want to be able to also save for retirement and invest my dollars. And I want to save for an emergency fund.

How do I do all of these things? All at the same time, this is a really important question. We're going to dive into how you can do that as well. So this is an action packed episode. If you're ready, let's get into it. So the first thing we need to understand is what is the bucket method? Well, the bucket method is something that we created here at master money that talks through how you can organize your savings.

We want to do this in a way that actually. Organizes your savings in specific categories. See what a lot of people do is they start to save money and they just throw it all into a high yield savings account with one big lump sum in that high yield savings account. What the bucket method is going to do is it's going to categorize each chunk of savings for what you are intending to save that money for.

And what this does is it allows you to keep your financial life organized, but also simplifies your money automations. And everything we talk about here at the personal finance, we are trying to. Automate as much as we possibly can. Why it reduces your stress around money, reduces your anxiety, and you are way more likely to build wealth by automating those dollars.

And so that's what we're focusing on today is how do we automate the savings rate and how do we get this bucket method set up? But first you need to understand, well, how much do I even need to save? I have no idea how much I need to save. From my income. So when I'm talking about the bucket method and savings, I do want you to categorize this as something that we are going to separate investments from.

So I'm going to give you some percentages here. And as I talk about this, this is going to be your savings towards your investments in your emergency fund. And then everything else that falls into that category can then go to some other savings rates. And so. When I say, Hey, I want you to save a minimum of 20 percent of your income.

I want that 20 percent to eventually all be going to investments. And so really, this is why we talk about saving 25 to 30 percent of your income. So that over time, that's your ultimate goal is where you want to get to, because over time, then you can take those extra allocations and start to put them towards Other things that you are interested in, like saving for a house or saving for a car, whatever your financial goals are.

And so the first thing is, if you're trying to figure out how much of your income to save is we need to identify your financial goals. If you want to retire, or if you want to make sure that there is a time. In your life that you are not working anymore, then that needs to take the first priority, meaning that as we start to save up money, we're going to have our emergency fund in place by following the one three six method.

So we're going to get one month of savings saved up in that emergency fund. Then we're going to pay off all high interest debt. And then once we get to three months in our emergency fund, we're going to start to split off some of our savings from emergency fund and investing. And then once we get the six months in the emergency fund, then we're going to put as much as possible into investing and make sure we are hitting those investment goals.

And then once we are doing that, then we can start to allocate dollars towards other savings goals. And so as we start to allocate dollars towards other savings goals, this is going to help us stay organized. And these extra dollars that we are putting towards other savings goals are really, really important.

So we're going to identify those goals first. Okay, and we have a course called master your money goals that comes out every new year that we will have available to you again. It shows you exactly how to set up your financial goals. So stay tuned for that. That will be coming up pretty soon. Then we're going to calculate our monthly expenses.

We need to understand how much we're spending every single month. Specifically, we need to know what our baseline expenses are, meaning the expenses that Are our necessities. And in addition, we also want to know what our variable expenses are, or the expenses that we can adjust or change. If we need to, this is going to be things like eating out or hobbies or money spent on, you know, child activities.

Those types of things can be adjusted over time. And we just need to make sure that we understand how we can do this. Then once we figure out how much income we have left over, then we can set our percentages. Now, the goal here is to make this percentage grow over time. How do we make this percentage grow over time?

One, we increase our income. This is going to naturally make your savings rate grow over time is increasing your income. And it is by far the easiest way to make your savings rate grow over time, because as our income increases, the amount of our income that we need can shrink as long as we maintain the same lifestyle.

Now your lifestyle is going to go up a little bit. Life changes. You're going to have kids, you're going to get married, or you're going to go into different stages of life. And so your lifestyle is going to inflate somewhat over time. But when we think about this, we want to make sure that we are still increasing our savings rate at the same time.

So what I like to say to a lot of people is, Hey, let's say, for example, you get a raise, let's say 50 percent of that raise, and then we can also spend 50 percent of that raise. That way our lifestyle can still go up and we can enjoy the fruits of our labor. But at the same time, we are also putting some of that towards our financial future.

Okay. And our money goals. And some of our money goals can be things like going on vacation. They can be things like, you know, spending money on a brand new car that you want, there's ways to set up these goals that are going to make sense for you. And I want to make sure that it all makes sense for you.

And so that's how we set this up is we identify our financial goals. We calculate our monthly expenses, and then we set a savings percentage. Now, what should this savings percentage be? Your investments are going to come first, but I would like you to be ultimately in the 25 percent to 30 percent of your gross income range.

This is where I want to see you start to save more money, but you can't start there. A lot of people start at 10 percent and then over time they start to grow this saving percentage. And you've heard me talk about this a lot. The 1 percent method where. If you can only save 10 percent of your income, start there and then find ways to increase that by 1 percent every single month over the course of the next 12 months, you're going to be saving 22 percent of your income instead of 10 percent of your income.

These gradual shifts in these gradual increases are going to help you over time get more savings. Into that savings account. And that's what we really want you to do so that you can allocate dollars towards your values. Now that's how we set up. That's how you figure out what percentage you should be saving is a large allocation should be going towards your investments.

The rest that are left over after you've maxed out your emergency fund and you've Filled up your emergency fund, at least six months, the rest leftover then can go towards some of these savings goals. And we're going to talk about how to create those buckets next. So once you have your savings percentages set up, you know how much money you actually want to save.

Now we want to create savings. Buckets. Now buckets are categories in our high yield savings count that are going to allow us to separate each of our savings goals. Now there are companies out there who can do this for you. They can help you through this process. The reason why I like Ally bank so much is because they have something literally called savings buckets that allows you to set up these allocations where you have, Hey, this is my vacation savings.

This is my. Wedding fund savings. This is my savings for my emergency fund. This is my savings for our car down payment. This is my savings for auto repairs. All of this can be listed out in ally and you can have up to 10 buckets. I believe is what it is right now. It allows you to have that available.

There are other places that also do this. I think SoFi does this. I think betterment does this. So there's a bunch of different companies out there that will allow you to have these savings categories or buckets, and they all have different names, but these are the types of savings accounts, especially with your high yield savings accounts that you want to find to make this a lot easier.

You can label it. It's all in one account, but you can label these accounts. The other way to do it though, is you can also have something like multiple savings accounts. People used to call this sinking funds. Uh, I'm not as gung ho on that only because you have to have separate account numbers and it really just becomes more complicated.

I'd rather you put your savings in a location that allows you to categorize these various buckets. So the first thing we're going to do here is when we start to figure out, Hey, which buckets do we want to set up? We're going to start with the essentials first. So your emergency fund is number one, top priority.

This needs to be in your high yield savings count, no matter what. And we're going to aim to get at least six months of expenses in this emergency fund. Ultimately, that's our goal. We have something called the one three six method where you save one month of expenses, pay off high interest debt. Then you save three months of expenses and you go ahead and you can start investing at that point in time.

And then you get all the way up to six months, the ultimate goal. And then you can save more beyond that if you want to, but six months is the minimum I think you need to have in that emergency fund available. So the essentials are your emergency fund is number one. If there is something else you Is essential to be saving for, then also you can put that under the emergency fund, but the emergency fund is by far number one.

Next, we're going to think through our short term goals. So short term goals are very, very important to have, and they're very important to start allocating for immediately. Let me give you an example of some of my short term goals. One is a vacation fund. I put cash into a vacation fund every single month.

And guess what? I'm not thinking, Hey, Oh, I forgot to put my cash in my vacation fund. Instead, I'm actually. Automatically allocating a certain amount of dollars towards that vacation fund. What's another great one? Another great one is holiday gifts. So what a lot of people do is they get to the holidays at the end of the year and they're like, Oh shoot, I got to buy everybody presents.

Where am I going to get this money from? Instead, what I want you to do is look how much you spent last year. And when you look how much you spent last year in January of every single year, you're going to take that number and you're going to divide that number by 12. And that's going to give you how much I want you to put into this holiday fund every single month, because your holiday fund, technically I want you to treat this as a monthly payment.

I don't want you to treat this as something that comes up. And surprises you because this is how people get into debt. Tons, millions and millions of people go into debt every single year during the holidays. And the reason why this happens is because they do not prepare ahead of time. I want you to prepare 12 months ahead of time because you can make these small monthly chunks, put them in your bucket, and this will allow you to avoid going into debt.

This is the beautiful thing about the bucket method. Is that you avoid going into debt in many different scenarios because you are saving for all of these different things. Another one is going to be let's say for example You want to get a new laptop or new electronics something along those lines? Put it in there put it in as a savings bucket and start saving for it Even if it's 10 bucks a month This is going to add up over time where you know You're going to be able to utilize this and if since this is automated It doesn't matter how many categories you have you save Set up those automation.

And this just happens. It just starts to grow over time without you even thinking about it or lifting a finger, a couple of years down the line, all of a sudden you have enough for that new laptop. Another big one though, that I like to put in here is sometimes you have that emergency fund available for this kind of stuff, but sometimes also like to have a separate fund for home repairs and auto repairs.

These two things are, I know I'm going to spend this money. This money is going to be coming flying out of this account, but for the short term goals, having home repairs and auto repairs, these come up every single year. They're always going to surprise you and you can use the emergency fund for those.

There's nothing wrong with that, but I sometimes like to separate it so that I can keep that emergency fund, that six months solidified in that location. So I like to separate them out. So I can see, Hey, these two are all for a home repairs or they're for auto repairs. And I put, you know, a hundred bucks, 200 bucks in each of those every month.

Just to give me that extra protection for those very common occurrences that happen all the time. Now, next we have something like a medium term goal. So what's a medium term goal. This is going to be things like saving for home renovations. If you want to do a home renovation, this is going to be things like saving for a new car.

If you want to do that, medium term goals are very important for a lot of people to understand that you don't have to do it right away and go into debt. Or you don't have to do it right away and put it on buy now pay later. Instead, save the cash up for six months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months. And you have this money set aside so that now you can do the thing you wanted to do and do it responsibly.

Being financially responsible and patience is a huge factor. When it comes to personal finance. So learning how to be patient is something I would definitely try to develop over time. And the way to develop this is to set up these savings buckets. This is so incredibly important to have these set up.

Now, next we have things like long term goals. Now, long term goals are going to be a number of different factors. This could be something like a down payment on a house. If you are going to buy a house in the next five years or less, I would make sure to keep this cash. In a high yield savings account.

And so funneling automatically towards your down payment, no matter how much it is, again, if this is small amounts of money, you have these huge, large, audacious goals, and it's still small amounts of money that you can funnel over there. It's okay. It is going to make a difference. It's going to make a dent over time.

And you'd be surprised how fast you can get there because life changes over time. And you've already got a head start because you decided to take action today. And that's what I want you to do is take action today. Automatically funneling money over there and then go and see what it looks like in the next couple of years.

Here's an example of how this kind of works. Let's say, for example, those of you who have had a corporate job for a little while or have had a blue collar job. It doesn't matter what style of job you have, but let's say you've had that job for a long period of time. Have you ever kind of not looked at your 401k for the last couple of years?

You know, you had it at a set and forget it thing. And all of a sudden you log in your 401k and you're like, holy cow. How did I get all this money in my 401k? This is exactly how this system works too, because your 401k is already automated. And so because your 401k is already automated, this is going to allow you to let your money grow over time.

We as humans are terrible with money. Even if you think about money a lot. We are terrible at managing money. Let's just get real about this. And so, because we are terrible at managing money, let's take ourselves out of the equation and instead allow our money to grow over time. So that's going to be your long term goals is things like your home down payment, maybe a college fund, but I'd rather you have that in a five 29, but if you want to save it in cash, you can, uh, things like major life events.

So things like a wedding fund, if you have a wedding fund that you're saving up for, or if you have some other big goals, maybe you want to buy a boat. Boats or something big, uh, then that would be in the long term goal. Sometimes a down payment on a car can be a long term goal, depending on what kind of car you're saving up for.

Let's say, for example, you have a dream car and let's say it costs 150, 000 for your dream car. What if you just started saving for it now? Even if you had 10 bucks every single month and you started to save for it now and let that money grow. I would argue that in 40 years, it's going to be very likely that even if you put small amounts of money towards that in 40 years, you'll be able to attain that goal.

And so whatever matters to you, whatever you truly, truly value is going to be something that you really need to think through. And that's what this all comes down to. It comes down to your values. What do I value? What do I want to get with my money? What do I want to get out of my life? And how can I do this?

And so setting up these buckets are going to allow you to do this. So the four categories again, are starting with essentials, making sure you have the essentials cover. This is usually going to be your emergency fund. Any other essential you may have, maybe you have to save up cash for long term care for your parents in the future.

Maybe you have to save up cash for some other essential that's going to happen and you know, it's coming up. Maybe, you know, you and your spouse are going to have kids and you're saving up for daycare. You know, there's all these different things that could happen. And so the essentials go first, then there's short term goals and the short term goals are things like your vacation fund, your holiday fund, anything that's a year or less is going to be your short term goals.

Then we have medium term goals, which is like a year to three years is typically how your medium term goals are going to look. And then you have your long term goals, which are going to be three years. To 10 years and anywhere in that range, or even longer. If you're doing stuff, like I said, like 40 years saving up for your dream car.

So this is something where you got to look at these ranges, see where they fit and then set up these types of goals and these styles of goals. Now, some of these, you may not be contributing to every single month. Maybe you get some extra cash, you get a bonus and you start throwing money towards that.

That's great because you still got to hit your retirement goals and all these other things. Things, uh, and so sometimes it's hard to get money in there, but just getting started, just even throwing a few bucks in there feels like progress. And so sometimes I just want you to try to make progress in some of the categories that matter to you so that when you start to save more money over time, it can make a huge, huge difference.

Now let's get into automating your savings buckets. When it comes to automating your savings buckets, one of the most important things that you need to do is determine how much you actually need to save. So because we figured out at the beginning what our savings rate is going to be, we're going to separate our investments out of that savings rate.

And how much do we have left over? And so when we decide, Hey, here's how much we have left over. over based on our income, we're going to say to ourselves, Hey, there's only so much money coming in. So how do we determine the savings goal for each? Well, what we're going to do is we are going to look at how much is left over and start to allocate it and map this thing out.

So what I like to do is sometimes I'll take the total chunk and I will start to play with it an ally and say, Hey, I got, let's just use a simple example. I got a thousand dollars. Thousand bucks available here for me to put towards my saving schools. I'm using a thousand dollars because it's a easy rounded number.

That might sound like a lot to you. That might sound like not a lot to you, but I'm just using this as an easy number for easy math, because your boy isn't good at public math. And so what I'm going to do is we're going to take this number and we're going to start to allocate it toward things. So maybe you're putting a hundred dollars towards the down payment on a car.

Maybe you're putting 250 towards a down payment on a house. And so maybe you're putting another one 50 towards your emergency fund. Cause it's almost fully funded. And then you're taking the rest, the other 500 bucks, and you're putting it towards a vacation fund. Cause you want to take a big vacation in the next couple of months.

Okay. So let's say that you do that and you set it up that way. What I want you to do is once you map this thing out, you write down all your priorities. You put them in order. Maybe you put 10 bucks towards a big future vacation that you want to take with the The entire family, 10 people. And so you're starting to save for that now, even though you think that's a decade away and then you put another 10 bucks towards something else.

Simple. I want you to take small chunks and I want you to think through this today. I want you to set these all up. And then what we're going to do is you're going to go into your bank accounts. You're going to link your checking account to your high yield savings count. Okay. And when you'd link that checking account to your high yield savings count, I want you to start to.

Automate the money into those accounts. Now, once you start to automate it in there, you can either do it. Like for example, Ally gives you the option and I'm not, I'm sure the other ones do too. They give you the option where you can automate the money in, and you can select which bucket you want those dollars to go to.

Which is a fantastic resource because all of a sudden the money is getting automated into your accounts, but it's also going into your buckets automatically with your savings goals in there. And so when you do this, you can set up your allocations one time. And then never ever have to do it again. And that is why I absolutely love this system because the buckets are in place.

You set up your automations one time, and then you can adjust accordingly later on down the line, but we just got to figure out how much money we have left. Now, another thing you can do. Is sometimes if you have sinking funds, if you're a big into sinking funds, you can also separate your paycheck. Uh, and some employers will allow you to separate your paycheck and go into different bank accounts.

And so sometimes you can split up that paycheck. Not all employers will allow you to do that though, because it's really a pain in their butt to set that up. And so that's one other way that you can do this. Another way that you can do this. If you love your high yield savings account and they don't have buckets, as you can use a tool like Monarch money.

If you go to Monarch money. com slash PFP, you'll be able to get a free month on this, but Monarch money will help you organize all of your savings. So if you have it all in one account, you can still categorize it inside of Monarch money so that you know how much you have there and how much you're allocating each month.

So say, for example, you want to save that thousand dollars a month and you want to split it up, you can split it up in Monarch money. So Monarch money will know, and then you can actually send it over to whatever high yield savings count you love to use. That doesn't have the buckets available. And so there's three ways to do this.

So number one is just the bank has, you know, automated buckets available to you. Number two is you can split up your paycheck with your employer, if they'll allow it. And then number three is using a tool like an automated budgeting tool that will just Budgeted automatically for you every month. And it knows based on some of the things that you set up in there, what this is going to look like.

So those are the three ways that you can set that up. And it's really, really helpful to see that, uh, come to fruition. And then what you do is you connect your bank account to the high yield savings account, make sure you transfer that money every single month, and then just set up those automations that way.

When we do money on autopilot, which is a course that we are working on right now, money on autopilot is actually going to show you exactly how to do this, you know, step by step with on video, uh, so that you can see what this looks like. So we're really excited about that. If you're interested in money on autopilot, please send me an email.

Uh, we can get you on the wait list. All right, last thing we're going to talk about is managing multiple savings goals. And so we'll jump into that next. All right, so lastly, we're going to talk about managing multiple savings goals. I think this is one of the most important things that you need to understand how to do.

And you need to give yourself some grace when it comes to managing multiple savings goals. Let's get real here. If you're watching on YouTube, I'm going to get real close to the camera. You only have so much money coming in every single month. And so what I don't want you to do is I don't want you to start beating yourself up because you feel like you can't hit all your multiple savings goals.

All right, now that we got that other way, let's talk through this. So what I mean by this is that most people just feel terrible about themselves because they're not hitting all of their savings goals. Well, guess what? Most people out there. Can't hit all their savings goals. Now, if you want to solve this problem, the way to solve this problem is obviously to increase your income over time.

Well, you're saying to yourself, well, die Andrew, that's easier said than done. And you are absolutely right, but growing our income over time and making sure we develop skills that help us grow our income, making sure we. Add streams of income. If we can either side hustles or side businesses, things like that, we had flywheels of income, which I will explain that in a future episode.

That's coming out very soon. If we do these three things, we can really start to grow our income over time. And as we start to grow our income over time, this is going to be something that can really shrink the percentage of our expenses that we actually need and allow us to have a lot of cash left over towards some of these financial goals.

Now, there's savings goals that we're going to spend, like vacation or a car down payment or a home down payment. That money is going to come out. But there's also savings goals that maybe it's going towards long, long term goals. We're really hoping to be able to grow over time. And when we want to do that, this is where that income can go towards.

I want the majority of that income going towards investments because you can't out save your own money. And so I want you to invest your dollars as much as you possibly can. That is number one. That is priority number one outside of the emergency fund is investing your dollars. But then once you have that investment automated and you got this really working, you're outpacing your retirement goals.

You're doing. All the right things. You're maxing out your Roth. You're maxing out your 401k. You're maxing out your HSA. You've got a taxable brokerage account. You're investing in real estate. Maybe you're doing all these different things. You're just going crazy when you do that. Then you can get some of these, you know, savings goals, long term setup, which is another great category, by the way, is real estate investing.

Uh, this is where I used to keep my real estate investing cash is also in a high yield saving account. So that's another great long term goal, which is another good example that I mentioned lately. So because you're trying to juggle all these savings goals, what I want you to do is I want you to take out a piece of paper or your iPad or your phone, whatever you like to use.

And I want you to put in order your savings goals. Now, emergency fund, if it's not fully funded, it's going to need to be number one, and I'm not going to let you deviate from that if it's not fully funded. So the emergency fund needs to be number one. If it's not fully funded at six months outside of that, I want you to start going down the list.

And listing in order your savings goals. What do you think is most important? Maybe to you, you want to travel the world. And so vacation fund is most important. Maybe to you, it is saving for a down payment. Maybe it's saving for a down payment on a house or a car. Maybe it is saving up for the rental property.

It doesn't matter what it is. I want you to list those in order. Now I would put things that are going towards assets. Like a rental property above everything else, but it depends on what your personal priorities are. So I want you to think about that. Maybe it is paying off some low interest debt, the debt bothers you and you want to pay that stuff off.

Maybe it is thinking about, you know, paying cash for college. You want to invest in your education. All of these are great options for you, um, to really think through. And then what you're going to do is you're going to see how much money you have leftover. Now we've already done that calculation and you're going to say to yourself, well, how much can I fund in each of these categories to achieve these goals?

I may not be able to achieve all of them. And because I have multiple savings goals, there are going to be some that you had to forego. You only have so much money coming in. And so once you have this order, start allocating the extra cash that you have on hand towards these goals. Okay. Some of these may get zero at the beginning until your income increases.

Then as your income increases, you're going to keep this. I want you to keep this list on you. Because as your income increases, I want you to start thinking, Hey, can I allocate some of this towards these savings goals? But first I want you to hit your investing goals. I want you to hit the emergency fund goals and then everything else falls into place.

So as you get raises, as you get income increases, you need to automatically increase your automatic contributions so that that money actually goes where you want it instead of just getting commingled in your checking account and getting freely spent on stuff you could care less about like target runs.

So figure out what you value. Put those values in order. And then what we're going to do is we're going to allocate money towards those values. That is how you juggle these multiple savings goals. Again, you can't always do it all. And so you only have so much income coming in. I want you to be able to realize that you could forgive yourself for not being able to hit every single savings goal.

You need to prioritize and then attack so that you can move on to the next savings goals that you have. This is how you conquer having multiple savings goals. Listen, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I hope our bucket method is going to help you with your savings goals. If you guys have any questions, please reach out to me.

Join the master money newsletter by going to mastermoney. co slash newsletter. Don't forget to follow us on all the socials. At master money co we're producing a lot of, uh, videos on Instagram, tick tock, all those other places as well. If you want some short bite sized, um, things that you can watch and then follow us on YouTube on YouTube, we are putting out a ton of different content, uh, the Andrew Giancola YouTube channel is how you can find me.

Just search for my name and it'll pop up. That's where we are putting fresh new videos. We're putting some of our, uh, YouTube shorts out and we're also doing, uh, the podcast as well. So listen, I appreciate each and every single one of you listening and I will see ya. On the next episode.