Welcome back to my channel.

I hope you're having a lovely day today and I hope it gets even better from watching this video.

Today we're chatting all about how to transform your finances.

What I'm about to share with you today was honestly one of the best things I've ever done for myself.

It has honestly like changed my life.

I know you can kind of throw that phrase around but it genuinely has changed so many things for me for the better and I'm especially grateful that I did this really early.

I did it in my early 20s.

I'm 26 now.

I just feel like it sets you off for such an amazing path just to learn about finances, create good financial habits and just become financially literate.

Like you're already so ahead of the curb especially if you're so young.

Like the more time you have the more you get to do.

So it really is like an incredible thing you get to do for yourself but even if you're older it's literally never too late.

So anyone's welcome here but today we're gonna be covering the basics.

We're gonna create an amazing financial foundation for you and just like anything like a house if it has a crappy foundation anything can just crumble.

So this is a really important step that I would definitely not miss.

So today we're gonna be covering budgeting and saving and building your emergency fund.

Those are in my opinion the first steps for anyone regardless of your financial situation that are really gonna set you up for success and then you can really build on that as I've already said.

Take it from someone who literally started from scratch.

Like I was not saving anything.

I was kind of living paycheck to paycheck.

Like I would spend whatever I would make.

I was so stressed about money.

Like just thinking about money gave me like a rash of anxiety and I just did not understand money and how finances work at all.

Like if you talk to me about investing it felt like a fantasy world.

So trust and believe you can really make a difference and this is what I started with and it then just snowballed and if I could do it you can do it also.

Also a disclaimer I'm obviously not a financial advisor.

These are just the steps that I did and that really helped me.

So we're gonna go through all of my tips and tricks and then at the end I'm gonna share with you a budget that I started with that's on Notion and I made that into a template so you can use it for free if you want to.

So that will be at the end but if you're new here hi I'm Nika.

Welcome.

I make videos all about self-improvement and I like to make them very like actionable.

Here are the tips, the tricks, the exact steps you can take so you can really make a legit difference.

So if that works for you I would love for you to stick around and subscribe and you can also check out my social media if you want to see more of my personal life.

Alrighty enough yapping.

Let's get into it.

So as I've already said we're saving and your emergency fund.

Your emergency fund is gonna be your first money goal and this is gonna be so important to build that foundation to build those really really good money habits that you can then build on and of course the way you're gonna reach this goal is by budgeting.

So the second part of this video which is gonna be all about budgeting is obviously very important so don't skip that but let's first cover your emergency fund.

So what is an emergency fund?

It's probably exactly what you think it is.

It's basically money that you're gonna put aside for emergencies.

So that could either be your car breaks down and all of a sudden you have this huge bill or you get a hefty vet bill or god forbid you lose your job or you can't work for x amount of months like that is the money you set aside for emergencies only.

So this shouldn't be like oh I have an emergency I need a whole new closet that is not an emergency girly pop.

No okay real emergencies let's just all keep that in mind.

So how much money should you put aside for your financial situation and your lifestyle?

But the rule of thumb is to save three to six months worth of your like basic expenses.

So for example if you lose your job you get to still live your life fairly normally and cover all of your basic expenses for three to six months whatever you decide.

So how many months you save as I've said depends on a few things.

One thing it depends on is your job and your income security.

For me for example my income varies a lot if you're a or you might get paid a lot more like it can fluctuate quite a bit so that's why I decided to save for six months just because that gave me more security.

It's also going to depend on your lifestyle so if you have kids a family then maybe you're going to want to save a bit more.

The last kind of crucial thing that it depends on in my opinion that you should definitely consider is your stress around money.

If you're someone who is kind of anxious about money all the time or you're anxious about your spending habits or if you're going to get enough money in your account then maybe you're going to want to save a bit more.

That was a huge component for me for wanting to save six months instead of three like I was so anxious about it and just thinking about having six months worth of expenses in my savings account gave me so much security and it really really lessened that stress and anxiety that I had around money and that was a game changer for my future basically.

It changed my mindset around money because I wasn't stressing about it so much and I then got to make more and save more and it really snowballed into amazing like money habits and financial future so I would definitely make sure to consider that as well.

Next up where should this money go?

So I highly highly recommend opening a high yield savings account.

The main reason is that you can put that money aside as soon as you get paid and then it's kind of like not there for you to think about and spend.

That honestly really helped me with my saving and how quickly I saved.

I saved 15,000 euros in 12 months and if I just had that money in my bank account I would have definitely spent a lot more than I did and therefore saved less.

A high yield savings account it's a savings account that earns you more interest so with you having that money in the account you're going to be making more of it just from it sitting in that account if that makes sense.

I would definitely do some research before you just open any standard savings account.

Ask around obviously depends on your country so I can't really recommend any but just do a little bit of research.

Don't spend too much time on this because you want to get started and actually start saving and budgeting as soon as possible.

So you now hopefully know how many months you want to save for, you know where this money is going to be so what is left for you to figure out is the amount that you're going to save for and the time frame for this goal so how quickly you're going to save up for your emergency fund so we can make a very strong plan so you can actually stick to it and get this done.

But we're going to put a pin in that for now because we need to figure out how much money you're making, where your money is going and how much you can realistically save and we're going to do all of that through creating your budget.

So we're going to come back to the emergency fund I promise you're going to have very clear goals and have it all figured out by the end of this video.

But let's get started with your budget.

A budget is basically your plan for where your money goes so it's basically your plan of action of how much you are willing to spend in different categories of your life like groceries or personal spending like getting your hair done, getting your nails done, travel, transportation etc and then how much money you're willing to put aside towards your money goals so this would be saving for first of all your emergency fund and then when you're done with that you might want to plan to save for a mortgage, investing, paying off debt etc.

So it's nothing more than a plan of where you're going to put this hard-earned money and of course that's going to depend on your current financial situation, it's going to depend on your lifestyle, your values like what is actually important enough for you to spend your money on.

It should reflect all of that this is why a budget is very personal and you shouldn't just stick to someone else's budget so we're going to make one that's tailored to you.

Before I started budgeting I was so scared to look at where my money was going, I didn't look at it, I didn't know my spending habits, I didn't know anything, it was just something I pushed to the side and I was like I'd rather know.

Ignorance is not bliss in this case okay it is not it just added to my stress and as soon as I was brave enough to look at where my money was going to look at my spending habits yeah it wasn't fun like I wasn't doing great but then I could make a plan of action that would get me to where I wanted to be and that made me feel empowered, it made me feel like excited for the future and also awareness of a problem is a problem half solved truly like you're not going to be able to solve your problem if you don't even know what it is in the first place so that leads us nicely to your audit.

This is basically going to be like the Marie Kondo method if you want to minimize your space and your belongings you're going to put everything out in front of you and you're going to see what sparks joy and that is what we're going to do with your expenses okay and I know this is not a fun enjoyable part for most of us like I did not enjoy looking at this okay it was not fun it took some time but it is worth it and it's not a step that you get to miss okay this is crucial.

The first step like Marie Kondo you want to have everything in front of you to see what you're working with so you want to have all of your expenses information in front of you so that means you're going to log into your bank accounts and you're going to download all of your bank statements from the last one to three months so obviously all of your different bank accounts credit cards debit cards we need all of that you can only do one month but the more data you have like if you choose three months then you have a much more accurate picture of where your money goes every single month which is the point of this.

The second step is we're going to create categories of where your money goes this obviously depends on your lifestyle if you use the budget that I created there's already some set categories you can work with but word of advice is to keep it simple and minimal.

We're going to have three sections for these categories the red zone the crucial and fixed expenses so these are the things you absolutely need to spend your money on so this might be housing like rent insurances phone plans etc so these are again things that are crucial for you like you have to spend money on them every single month and they do not change of course you can call your phone provider and get a better plan or size down on your apartment but for the most part these expenses are not going to be changing.

Then we have the yellow zone which are the crucial expenses but are not fixed so this would be things like transportation or your grocery bills like you need to get around you need to get to your job you need to eat so you're going to be spending money on these but they're going to vary month to month.

This is the category where you can definitely minimize your spending a little bit but again not so much because a girl's got to eat a girl's got to get around okay.

And lastly we have the green zone this is what I like to call play money okay these are the things that are not crucial and are not fixed so this would be things like eating and drinking out self-care like your beauty expenses or your therapy sessions or pilates classes travel is also in this category and then also personal spending like beauty products clothes books journals etc.

Again this is play money and none of these expenses are crucial for your survival so when you're deciding to limit your spending this is the category that you're how this is going to work when I show you the budget but just to give you a very clear example so one category as we've said is groceries and then let's say you looked at the last three months which in this case would be April May and June so you'll write April I spend I don't know 200 euros on groceries May I spent 215 and then June I spent 230 and you're going to do that for every single category.

How much you decide to limit yourself obviously depends on your income and expenses ratio which we're about to look at and also your values like you might find getting your hair done really really important and it makes you feel really good and confident and that is worth it to you.

For me for example might not be the case and I might want to spend a bit more on maybe dining out and leave my hair alone you know it depends on you and the point of a budget is not to cut yourself off from all the joys of life and all the things that make you happy we're just out our income expenses ratio and how much money we actually have to play with and to work with we need to look at our income so this is obviously going to be very simple if you have one stream of income your full-time job doesn't really change easy peasy okay you've got that number this by the way should be your net income so all of your income after taxes and all of that so the amount of money you actually have to work with to spend if you have a few different income streams that fluctuate or if you're a freelancer and your income is kind of all over the place what you're going to do is you're going to look at your income from the last 12 months so you're going to write January I made 3000 euros February x amount etc so you're going to have a full view of the last year and then you've got two options you can either calculate the average so you use your average income and set your budget and saving goals around that or you can take the month where you made the least amount of money so let's say my lowest income month was March and I made 1500 euros I'm going to take that amount and create my budget and how much I save around that that is just so you're on the safe side so you're not overspending you're not spending more than you're making so this is again totally up to you I like to take the minimum amount just because again with my like stress around money my history with that I'm like I just want to be safe and sound so in order to save a substantial amount that you're happy with you're probably going to cut your spending in that green zone if your income expenses ratio is a little skewed like you spend more than you make then you're going to limit yourself in the green zone and if you're still spending more than you're making or if you don't have enough room to save anything and if that's really important to you then you're probably going to want to cut down in that yellow zone if you can and then with the red zone as we've already said you can call your like phone provider or anything like that to try to negotiate a better price or you can size down on your apartment how ruthless you are with your budget how much you limit yourself is going to depend on your situation it's going to depend on how much you make and then also your money goals obviously like if you have a lower income and you have a lot of like debt for example or you have a mortgage or something like that then you might want to cut yourself more so your budget is again very personal it depends on you and your situation and your money goals and of course the more you make the more you get to save you can only save as much as you earn but you can usually for the most part find a way to earn so that would definitely be something i would look at if i was in a situation where i'm spending way more than i'm making and of course you can only limit yourself so much like you still need to live your life and take care of those basic expenses so that means either asking for a raise switching your job looking into side hustles like there are options out there but i don't want to be insensitive to anyone like obviously we have different situations but of course the more you make the more you get to save already with all of that being said we can finally create your budget there are three different ways you can do this i'll go through each one and you can decide which one works best for you i'll also share with you which one i used so the first one is a very clear simple straightforward one that's amazing if you're just starting out and you have no idea like where to put what amount of money it's the 50 30 20 rule so 50 percent of your income goes towards your needs so that would be that red and yellow zone and then 30 percent goes towards your savings so in this case we're starting with an emergency fund so 20 percent would go to your emergency fund and then when you're done with that those 20 percent can go towards paying off debt investing etc and again we're working with your net income here so the income you have left over after all of your taxes and all of that the second option is a little bit more personal more tailored to you so you would just go category by category so again looking at that groceries category you see the last three months and then you set a realistic goal and you do that with every single category and then you can see how much money you have left and then that would go towards your savings and then the last way you can create your budget is to look at your savings first so to set a saving goal for yourself let's say you want to save 6 000 euros for your emergency fund and then you calculate how much you would have to save every single month to get to that point in this case it would be 500 euros and then the rest of the money you have left over is what you create your budget around this is the one that i chose i think it's the least straightforward like it's the hardest to set up because it's kind of sometimes hard to tell how much you can realistically save but i was very adamant about saving 15 000 euros in one year like i was very determined to reach that goal so i knew that i would you know limit myself as much as i had to in order to reach that goal so i think it also depends a little bit on your personality type and how serious you are about this and also your income of course like if you don't have that much money to play with that's going to be way harder to do something to consider but pick one that is best for you let's circle back to that emergency fund so we still need to figure out how much exactly you want to save what is your emergency fund goal and then also how quickly you want to do it like what is the time frame to achieve that goal because that is necessary when you are setting goals like you need to have a time frame of when you want to complete it so let's say you chose to save three months worth of your basic expenses and through doing that money audit you figured out that your basic expenses are 1500 euros so that makes your euros so that is the amount you want to save and then the time frame is obviously totally going to depend on you how quickly you think you can save this money how much money you have to play with in the first place so you're going to have to sit down and figure that out for yourself obviously the most straightforward is if you use the 50 30 20 rule you know that 20 of your income goes towards the emergency fund you can calculate how much that is and then figure out how long it will take you to reach your emergency fund goal whatever you decide this goal should obviously be achievable something you can actually do but that's also a little bit of a challenge so now you should have a very clear savings goal and a very clear plan of where your money is gonna go so you set those limits you set a budget and now all you have to do is stick to it for me this saving goal was very very important because that was the whole reason why I was budgeting and sticking to it but one thing that really really helped me to like stay even more motivated and continuously excited to keep going was a flow chart and that sounds so stupid but it honestly made such a huge difference for me I drew like a flow chart in my journal and then I would color in every time I put that money into a savings account and I don't know why this worked so well for me okay it might not work for you but honestly it like kept me going so much I was so excited like I would look at it all the time and be like oh my god I only have like this amount left and it like made such a big difference so I highly recommend trying that out um it was amazing for me but obviously through all of this you're gonna build such amazing financial habits that are gonna last forever like when you're a bit more financially secure or free like you're still probably gonna at some point want to buy a house or save some money for your future children or whatever you're doing like those habits are gonna help you get there and it's so important and so amazing that you're doing that now you're really setting yourself up for success and for an amazing future obviously with creating an emergency fund as I've said it really gave me so much security so I kind of left that financial stress out the door and that helped me to create a really positive abundant financial mindset and I started to feel completely differently about money like it was something that I realized I'm very interested in I started researching it my whole view around money completely changed to something that was actually like exciting and interesting instead of it being something that was so stressful something I didn't even want to look at because I no thank you I don't want to know and I really feel like because of that I started making so much more money like because I was positively focused on it I was obviously researching ways to make more of it like it changed everything for me honestly when it comes to money but it also made me so much more confident like I still don't exactly know why maybe it's just reaching a goal obviously makes you feel good it makes you feel confident and it took me a year which is a fairly long time and I really stuck to it so that gave me so much confidence in myself that I can do this it gave me confidence that I can talk about money because I actually knew what I was talking about now I kind of understood at least the basics and you just start to build that momentum so all in all all of this I know it takes some time and effort to get into it and to stick to it but it is so so so worth it you're literally doing this for yourself or your future self and there's no investment better than that and no one can ever take that away from you the last thing we want to do is go through the budget that I made so you know exactly how to use it it's obviously free it's going to be linked down below there are so many different budgets this one is very very basic this is the one I started with it's literally nothing fancy um but it worked for me so I might as well share it but there are so many that you can find on youtube on pinterest some are free some are not so if this one doesn't work for you that's totally fine just find one that does okay or you can even build your own you can do it in your journal you can do it on excel notion whatever works for you so when you click on the link to the template it will open up to this you obviously need a notion account which is free and then you would go right here click on that duplicate it and then you can use that template once you have the template on your notion account you can change the name of it here so you can do my budget 2024 whatever you want you can change the icon here you can also add a cover like a banner on top if you want to and then the first step is to write your money goals so that would be your emergency fund goal let's say that's 6 000 euros and you can delete the other two because we just want to be focused on that at the moment you can write your paycheck routine here if you want to starting balance so this is the money you currently have okay anywhere and everywhere so let's say that's 3 000 euros this is more for motivation purposes so you can look at it a year from now and see how you've done for example and then you've got different tables you've got your income table savings expenses and then your yearly balance all of these tables that i'm going to show you are set for euros you can change this by clicking on the amount going to edit property and then number format and you can change that here you'll have to change this for every single table it's a little tedious and annoying but once you do that you won't have to do it again so your income table looks like this it has a filter so when you click on this you can choose a month so obviously if you don't have a month chosen it's going to show you your income for the whole year and you can see the sum of that below but let's change that to the current month july so i can see i've made 3 000 euros you can obviously add income streams you just click on this write the income stream add the month and the amount your savings table is very similar so the filters work exactly the same way and then again you add it the same way so you write the amount let's say 200 euros and then you choose what you're saving for so at the moment that's an emergency fund then you have different options you can also add one here by just writing it and clicking enter again very simple and then we've got your expenses table so this is going to be something that you're going to use when you're doing the audit so you're going to write the expenses in different categories for the last one to three months so in this case that's april may june and then of course you set a limit for each category i just did it for groceries so you can see how it works and then you obviously update your spending for the current month i like to update my budget once a week and then i write the last time i updated it right here just so i don't calculate the same things again on accident it's definitely happened to me before so i recommend doing that and then right here we have your yearly balance so your kind of 2024 budget so you can see everything very clearly there are definitely budgets out there that already calculate this for you there are no formulas for this budget it's very very simple so again might not work for you but i kind of like the fact that my budget was really really easy to use easy to set up to begin with and then i kind of you know updated it made it a bit fancier later on so let's say it's the end of july i go up here i can see i've made 3000 so that's my income i saved 500 so i'll just write that in so july 3000 euro income savings are 500 i'll be able to see the sum of my expenses right here so i just write that amount here let's say that's 2500 euros and then you can also calculate the percentage of your income saved so in this case that would be around 16 and then it will calculate the average for the whole year which is just really helpful to see with how well you're doing so that is the whole budget again very simple have a link down below it's free you can use it you cannot use it do whatever you like alrighty guys that is it for this video i really really hope you enjoyed it and found it helpful please let me know what other money related videos you want to see literally anything okay you just let me know and i'll get that done for you okay i love talking about money i really want to make this into a series so i am happy to make anything you want to see so just let me know thank you guys so much for watching and i'm gonna see you very very soon