10 EXTREME MINIMALIST BUDGET TIPS (SAVE 70% OF INCOME) // Spend Less

Last year, 63 percent of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, and that's not just low-

income

workers, even people who made more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. Of those people, 18 were still living paycheck to paycheck and in July 2019, 28 of the adults were living paycheck to paycheck. in the US they said they had no emergency savings, now some of it is probably the result of bad money habits, but unfortunately many of us are bankrupt due to circumstances beyond our control, I mean hello global pandemic , in my case it was because my parents had already passed away long before I graduated from college and, despite having worked several minimum wage jobs since I was 16 and 17, I still graduated with my master's degree in speech pathology and the language and a debt of 25,000, oh not to mention I graduated in great recession no job offers anyone to ask for help so what did I do?

So happy rich husband of course just kidding my husband grew up in

extreme

poverty in rural China all seven members of his family slept in one room that's because their house only had two rooms they grew up in poverty that most people in the US can't even imagine. If you are interested in knowing more about my husband's story, come down and press the like button and comment on this video and if this video gets a thousand likes. I'll ask him to come and tell a little more about his story, including how he came to California in the '90s and paid 300 to sleep in someone's shed in the backyard.

Hello and welcome to my channel. My name is Marissa and I'm a

budget

er turned

minimalist

and a lot of you have been asking me recently if I have any

minimalist

budget

ing

tips

that I can share with you and wow, so today I'm going to share with you my top 10

tips

for prepare a budget. As a minimalist, these are the real, practical steps and tips my husband and I took so we could save 50 to 70 percent of our

income

each year and pay off 250,000 debts, including house, cars, student loans , etc., pay for our wedding and honeymoon all in cash without any help from parents follow our dream of moving to Europe and buy a house there and be able to furnish our new home with the kitchen of our dreams and beautiful furniture all for zero cash debt and I am not telling you our story to brag or show off in any way, but I share it in the hope that you can understand and believe, if we could get out of poverty and debt and make our dreams come true, why couldn't you Make sure you watch this video until the end because each tip is even better than the last.

Well, let's get into my top 10 minimalist budget tips and tip number one is to embrace your weirdness. We have a consumerist society that constantly sends us messages. that we need to buy the newest and latest things to feel happy and successful. We've internalized these messages about consumerism and

spend

ing so much that if you're serious about saving money, you might scare the people around you. They might think you're too weird, too cheap, too careful with your money, any number of complaints, for example, one time I was on the playground with my kids and I was talking to some of the moms while our kids were playing, they were from the local school. and I knew the moms only vaguely, but we had talked a couple of times and one of the moms mentioned the fact that she had a big party coming up and she wanted to buy a fancy new dress for the party and asked if we had many of the other moms They chimed in and mentioned expensive local stores, but I personally love secondhand shopping and I mentioned that if you didn't mind taking the time to do a little searching, you could find some absolutely beautiful name brand designer dresses, sometimes even with the tags still on those moms looked at me like I had grown two heads and the one who asked for the reference actually rolled her eyes at me okay karen I guess you don't like 500 dresses for nine dollars they never talked to me again in the park after that.

What I mean is that some people around you might reject you and I'm not just talking about random people in the park but even your friends and family might think that you are being too frugal and stingy with whatever you want. stick to your beliefs and remember what you are working on, which brings us to the next point, which is writing down your financial goals, what you are trying to achieve with your budget and/or. minimalist lifestyle there are all types of minimalists and just because you are a minimalist doesn't mean you are frugal or vice versa or maybe you are frugal in one area but don't mind

spend

ing money on something else, take for example Steve Jobs who considered himself a minimalist , she wore the same outfit every day and at one point had almost no furniture in her house, but she also lived in a 14,000-square-foot mansion, so

extreme

frugality is about cutting expenses as much as possible.

It is possible so that you save as much money as possible, on the other hand, when you apply minimalism to your finances, I think it makes it a little more personal and fun while you focus on cutting expenses and spending

less

. You are also directing your time and energy toward creating more time and space for the things you value in your life. I would say that financial minimalists also have a very positive relationship with money. I never look at my life in terms of what I'm missing. and I am not trying to accumulate money to accumulate material possessions but I am trying to create prosperity and abundance so that I have the freedom and time to do the things that I value and that bring me and my family joy.

Think of it like a magnet, you attract what you focus on so take some time to think about what you are trying to achieve with a minimalist lifestyle and with a budget and a journal, write it down somewhere or you can do something like what I did. is creating a vision board. My next tip is that you should track your money and create a budget considering we spend so much money in our society. It's funny that money is such a taboo topic. Money is such a taboo subject that one in four. Parents don't even talk to their children about money or their financial situation.

If you want to take control of your finances, you need to start keeping track of every penny and create a budget that works for you and if you've never kept track of how much money you need. what you're spending, I challenge you to track every dollar, every penny you spent for the next 30 days and see where your money will make things easier for you. I'm going to link below a free printable monthly spending tracker as well as a free budget planner that will help you track your spending for an entire month and then create a budget based on that, so be sure to hop on over and grab its printable below again.

It's totally free and is something that's built around the method I've used to track and budget our money for the last 12 years, which brings me to my next tip, which is to cut back on spending, especially on the big three. I'm not talking about fancy sports leagues or fancy schools. The big three here are the three categories that most people spend the majority of their income on and these include housing, food and transportation. People tend to start cutting their spending in smaller categories like clothing or entertainment, but you'll often find that you get more bang for your buck if you trim fat from those three big areas first.

This is where minimalism can really help you shine. When you start decluttering, you may find that you don't have as much stuff when you don't have that much stuff. maybe you don't need a house that big if you don't need a house that big you can downsize and that means a smaller mortgage payment if you live in the city maybe you decide you don't need that car and you can take a bike everywhere, as for For us, we sold both of our cars when we moved abroad and we have a car here. I didn't buy a car myself and we almost always walk or take public transportation, except for longer distances, I found that being able to cut the food budget made a big difference in our monthly results.

We save a lot of money every month because I can take the simplest, cheapest, healthiest ingredients and turn them into multiple healthy meals and snacks for my family. In fact, I have to do it. I say I regret how good I've become at cooking because now my husband never wants to go out to eat because he says my food is as good as the restaurant's. My fifth tip is to think free and cheap before you go out. and buy something new, take a moment to consider if this is something you could get totally free when it comes to toys.

My kids don't want fancy bath toys, what they want is an empty bottle of ketchup and soap to spray on each other in the bathtub. I've taken things I literally found in the trash and turned them into beautiful home decor pieces and luckily with the internet there are entire groups online dedicated to swapping free stuff to save money and live sustainably. Look for local groups that don't buy anything. and you can give and exchange goods for free, but minimalism, as we know, is not just about finding the cheapest, you also want to find something that you are happy with and that adds value to your life even if you are not.

Being able to find what you want totally free, that doesn't mean you have to pay top dollar for it, many times you can shop around and can find similar options for a fraction of the cost. My sixth tip is to practice conscious spending and I have already made a whole video on conscious spending which I will link here if you are someone who tends to overspend every month because you are a shopaholic, there are ways to curb your spending and to save more money each month tip number seven is your time is money one of my favorite quotes says something like this look around all that clutter used to be money all that money used to be time when you start thinking about buying something think about how many hours you spend you would have to work to be able to pay for that item when you start thinking about your money in terms of the time it takes, maybe the expensive things you are thinking of buying don't seem so attractive anymore, that goes along with tipping.

Number eight, which is to increase your income. Now anyone with common sense knows that you can only cut so much from your budget before there is nothing left to cut. What do you do if you've cut back everything you can and then at the end of the month you're still in the red we need food we need shelter we need clothes un

less

we're nudists I guess then you need to increase your income now when it was in the red university, I did it assuming a second or a third. job, but now a little thing called the Internet has made it easier than ever to start a side job to generate extra income and many times you don't even need to leave the comfort of your home, in fact, it began my journey towards minimalism. when I started sorting out the 30 years of clutter I had been accumulating after my parents died and started selling it online and posting between my kids' naps when I was a stay-at-home mom and easily making a thousand dollars a month or more, yeah If you are interested in learning more about how to start selling your clutter online for cash, I will link a video I made above.

Note that in this video I mentioned that I won fifteen. thousand dollars selling or clutter online and I recently went back and totaled everything from the time I started to the time we moved and I actually made 50,000 selling our clutter online. Keep in mind that this includes an entire home with 30 years of clutter and two cars, but still all that unwanted stuff turned into money - basically, if you need to make a little extra money, your own closet is a great place to To get started, other common side hustles include dog walking, driving to resell super second-hand stuff to make money, or even starting a blog or YouTube channel.

Tip number nine is to automate your savings and payments. How often have you opened an envelope or logged into your bank account to see some sneaky fee added because you forgot to pay a bill? on time or received any overdraft fees, for example, Chase bank charges of up to 39 for a single late payment fee on a credit card. If you look at what the average savings account yields, even if you have a thousand dollars in there with a 0.1 percent ap, then you're still only making 10 cents on that 1000 by the end of the year. That doesn't really seem fair.

Give so little and still receive so much if you make sure you always have enough money in your bank account? Pay your bills on time and automate your bill payments, then you will be less likely to miss a payment and incur some kind of late payment fee, then you will just have to log in every week or monthly to check and make sure everything is working. how was itplanned, it's also worth paying yourself first see what I did there if you find it difficult to save money if you have it in your hand or if you see it in your checking account, why don't you try putting the amount you want to save? immediately into your savings account and then live off the rest after that, so instead of saving what's left after spending, you spend what's left after saving, sounds crazy but it's a great way to convert saving in a habit and my end.

Tip number 10 is to continue educating yourself. I'm so passionate about money and budgets that I could literally sit here and talk to you for days straight, but then this video would last thousands of hours and literally no one would. I'd like to see it, so I'll leave you with the last point, which is to continue educating yourself about personal finance, budgeting, saving money, and making lots of money. Knowledge about personal finance is at our fingertips. There are entire YouTube channels and websites that provide free information on how to budget, how to save more money, and how to increase your income.

There are also many five-star rated personal finance books you can get. amazon or your local library where you can continue your education. I hope you enjoyed today's video, if you made sure to give it a thumbs up and if you are interested in hearing more ways to live minimally and save more money, increase your income income go down and hit the subscribe button and subscribe to my channel, we would love to see you again soon, it's okay, take care, bye, I don't know.