You've Got Budgeting Backwards

The Jesse Mecham Show

YNAB

Kids & Family, Education

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To many, the word "budget" brings to mine restrictions, guilt, punishment, and a general feeling of dread that they don't have control over their money, much less hit their budget goals. But this idea that a budget means setting hard limits on spending in various categories, then looking back every month to see if you were "good" or "bad" in adhering to those limits... it's all backwards!

Jesse has another way to look at "budgeting," or planning as he calls it. You give every dollar you have a job -- you look at what future expenses you know you have coming and put those dollars into categories to cover those expenses. Once you have your future expenses covered, then you start thinking about what else you'd like to do with your money: take a trip, buy some new clothes, maybe go out to a nice restaurant. Then, as life happens and your needs change, you can move the money around. It's not a failure that your spending doesn't perfectly adhere to some arbitrary category number, it just means you got new information, circumstances changed, and therefore your spending plan needs to change with it.

Once you wrap your head around this way of thinking about money, of planning for the future rather than looking backwards and punishing yourself, then you can start loving the way you spend. Guilt free.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, my name is Jesse Meekam with another episode of the Jesse Meekam show, and I'm here each week to obsess out loud to myself, to this camera, and to all of you about spending
0:22.6	purposefully, saving aspirationally, giving joyfully. It all comes down to just one single
0:28.3	solitary principle, and that is to give every dollar a job, a job you wanted to do, a purpose,
0:35.4	something that will energize that dollar to runoff and serve you and serve you well.
0:40.6	When people set up a budget, you'll often hear them talk about sticking to a budget.
0:45.9	We don't stick to budgets.
0:47.9	We actually want budgets to stick to us.
0:50.0	But a budget in the traditional sense, and it's a word I don't like to use very often, and honestly try and avoid like the plague, ironically.
0:58.8	But the traditional sense of the word budget is,
1:02.4	I'm going to set this spending limit and how dare I exceed it.
1:06.8	And that's basically it.
1:08.8	Usually these are set at times where you are wishing you had more money than you do.
1:13.6	They are set at times when you're feeling like you deserve maybe a couple lashings.
1:18.9	You deserve a little punishment.
1:20.8	You need to eat a little crow.
1:22.3	I'm not sure where that phrase came from.
1:24.5	Don't care for it.
1:25.2	That's kind of nasty.
1:26.4	But the idea is, I mean it's it's surrounded
1:31.5	by negativity it is it's not like secretly negative like people are like they're so resigned
1:38.2	when they finally have to set up a budget uh because it means the fun is over.
1:47.1	Life as you know it is over.
	...

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