Giving Future You A Bit More Negotiation Ammo
The Jesse Mecham Show
YNAB
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
Jesse shares a trick for improving your Rule Two planning (Embrace Your True Expenses), and better prepare for the next unexpected expense.
Jesse suggests pulling your last six months of bank statements, and quickly scanning them for large expenditures. Look at the number of digits, and flag the transactions that have a large number of digits (to you). This should only take a few minutes. Note the payee. This exercise is the first place to look when planning for future unexpected expenses. Did you get in a fender bender and end up with a $1,000 bill from the body shop? Did you hire a plumber to fix some leaking pipes in your basement? These are possible future expenses you can use Rule Two to plan for.
Now, hopefully you won't be getting into fender benders on a regular basis! But that auto shop expense might trigger you to think about upcoming regular car maintenance that you haven't yet budgeted for. Likewise, owning a house means regular maintenance, so at some point you're probably going to call a plumber out again. Time to assign money in your budget and plan for that!
This is a good, easy strategy for improving your Rule Two thinking, and put future you in a better financial position.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Wineappers. My name is Jesse. Meekam with another episode of The Wineapp Podcast, |
| 0:09.1 | where we teach you four rules to help you stop and pitch to paycheck, get out of debt, |
| 0:12.6 | and save more money. I'm going to talk a little bit about rule two today, and bring up a tactic, |
| 0:19.8 | a little trick you can use to do rule two a little better. As you know, rule two is we call it |
| 0:27.2 | embracing your true expenses. It's the idea of thinking long, but acting on that thinking. Now, |
| 0:34.4 | think long, act now. And with that, sometimes in order to think long, you have to kind of look |
| 0:42.0 | backward. So one little trick that people do when they're just getting set up, and you don't want |
| 0:47.2 | to be caught by the next unexpected expense is pull your bank transactions, like download a CSV, |
| 0:55.6 | don't do like all the PDF statement downloads that takes too long. Just load, you know, six months of |
| 1:02.1 | transactions online, like on the interface. Don't do this on your phone. I think it would be a |
| 1:06.0 | little too tedious, and kind of blur your eyes a little bit so that you just see the digit length. |
| 1:14.2 | And this works for US dollars. I would assume this works also for other currencies. |
| 1:19.5 | But kind of blur your eyes and start to scroll kind of slowly, and let large amounts just pop out. |
| 1:30.1 | Okay. Just they'll kind of like that extra digit will just kind of pop, whether it's five digits, |
| 1:34.6 | the cause of alarm, four, three, everyone's different, especially the different currencies. |
| 1:39.6 | Yeah, do that. And just look back through literally a year. And this is quick. The look back part |
| 1:45.4 | takes you, oh, I don't know, a minute, two minutes. Look back, write down the pay, write down the |
| 1:52.2 | amount, write down the date. I'm like write it down on a piece of paper. Don't don't go all |
| 1:56.7 | spreadsheet on this thing. Just do it nice and simple. Once you've got those transactions that |
| 2:02.8 | just kind of jumped out at you, you might have three, ten, I don't know. That's where that's |
| 2:09.2 | the first place you look to see if some of those expenses might pop up again, or like-minded |
| 2:17.0 | expenses. So you might see that you're like, oh, yeah, that was at the, you know, Bob's auto repair |
... |
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