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It's more than just a ticket. The show recently has been kind of touchy-feely, a little big picture. And I'm concerned about that because this show is big picture, but it's also practical and tactical. And so today, let's talk tactics and be extremely practical. And here's the scenario. You are in financial distress or you know somebody in financial distress.

That might mean that you just got laid off from a job. It might mean that you're behind on your bills. That might mean that something unexpected has happened or you've just woken up and realized that you're not very good with money. It's okay. Been there, done that myself. I'm going to share with you today some ideas and some tools and some tactics that will help you take control of the money that you have.

Get a pen, get a piece of paper. This is an episode if you are ever in financial distress or you know anyone, this is an episode to share with them. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you so much for being here today.

Radical Personal Finance, the show where we talk each and every day about everything that you need to know and more importantly, everything that you need to do to build financial freedom and financial independence in your life. That might be a long way off, at least the idea that you can sit back and live on your investments.

That might be a long way off for you, but the idea of having control doesn't have to be a long way off. We're going to get to that today. Thank you all so much for being here. Like I said in the intro there, I want to talk about some practical stuff.

I've been looking back at the show content, just kind of thinking about it. Part of this has just been due to my being a little bit busy outside of the show in the last few weeks, but I'm a little concerned that I've strayed from some of the core messages of Radical Personal Finance and I'm not willing to stray for very long.

So I've strayed a little bit away from the practical content and I've also strayed a little bit away from the technical financial planning content. This show is intended to be comprehensive. You need the big picture. You need the thought process. You need the paradigm. You need the motivation and the encouragement, but we also need the tactics and the tools and the specific techniques that we can apply today to get us closer towards our goals.

I want to talk about how to implement a simple budgeting process into your life. Today, I'm specifically focused on those of you who are listening who are struggling with the basics. I do not expect this show to be applicable to everybody. This is absolutely not applicable to everybody. We're going to be talking a little bit about budgeting over the coming weeks and I'm going to be talking about some different styles of budgeting.

To be clear, my opinion on budgeting is that you've got to find a method and a solution that works for you and that will vary depending on the type of person that you are. For some of you, it will be very hands-on. For others of you, it will not be hands-on.

For some of you, it will be very, very physical and tangible. For others of you, it will be electronic. All of these are fine, but there are some fundamental truths that apply across the board. I'd like to start with this one. If you do not carefully manage the money and resources that you now have, it's unlikely that you will ever have much more to manage in the future.

You've got to start where you are, no matter where that is. If you do not currently do a good job managing the resources that you currently have, how on earth do you expect to ever get more? As Jim Rohn used to say, "A guy says to himself, 'Well, if I had a little bit more money, then I would learn to manage it well.'" Not going to work.

If you learn to manage the money that you have well, then in the future you're going to have more. It's pretty simple, but we really don't look at it that way. I'll tell you, I've been there myself in times of financial constraint, in times when I'm just flat out broke.

You look around and say, "Ah, what's the use? I'm broke." So I'll just toss my hands in the wind and not worry about it. I've seen this time and time again from many people that I've worked with as well. But when you're broke, that's the time that you've got to be very, very hands on if you ever want to have any hope of being in a different place.

I'll tell you, I speak today from a little bit of personal experience. I feel like in my life I've gone in and out of the edge so many times that I'm well familiar with what you need to do when you get to the edge. I've been in debt, out of debt, in debt, out of debt.

It seemed like every time for years, it would seem like every time I got just a little bit ahead, then all of a sudden something would happen and I would get knocked right back, whether I get laid off or start a business or have an unexpected financial emergency and all of a sudden, boom, root canal, out of money.

Or all of a sudden there's a change of course and a change of plans. I'm thankful now for that experience because it's built some confidence into me that I can look back and say, "Well, I know what to do when things get tough." So today I want to share some ideas with you and some specific tools and tactics.

Now what I have to share with you is not necessarily easy. It is simple, but it is not easy. I don't think it's that tough, but I got to start with that disclaimer because in our culture many people just expect everything to be very easy. Frankly, this is not super easy, but it's worth it.

What I mean is it's worth it to take some time and to take some control of your situation. Last couple of weeks have not been an easy time in my life. I'm right now in a crunch zone even with my business and with my family life and basically across the board.

I'm finding myself in a position where at the end of July here, my external consulting contract which I was using to pay my bills is coming to an end. Radical personal finance is starting to be financially productive, but it's not productive to the point where I'd like it to be.

I have some savings and things in reserve, but I don't really want to dip into that. So I'm sitting here looking and saying, "Okay, what am I going to do? What are the next actions that I need to focus on?" Plus it's just been challenging with the birth of our new little baby girl and settling into a new routine and helping my wife and dealing with the variable sleep schedule and all of that.

All of a sudden doing all of that right at the time where I'm trying to build the business up and launch a bunch of affiliate programs and get some stuff and some products created on my end. It's not been easy. It's been really, really challenging. But at least if I've got some things to do, then that makes the challenge feel a little bit better because then I can just put my head down and work on the next thing.

And if I don't know the things that I'm going to do and if I'm not clear on my priorities, if I'm not clear on exactly where everything is going, then it's easy to feel overwhelmed. But if I know where things are going and I know what's happening, no matter how difficult the circumstances may be, at least I can drop it down into a tangible problem and I can say, "Okay, this is the problem and this is the solution." From a business perspective, it comes out to be a total amount of money that you need.

If you're in a situation of financial distress, it might mean, "How do I come up with the money to pay that credit card bill?" or "How do I come up with the money to pay this other bill?" Well, we got to get tactical and we got to take control.

And if you take control and you realize, "Well, I'm just not going to be able to do it," you're going to feel a lot better about being late on a bill or having to pick and choose which creditors you pay versus being in a situation where you're just kind of forestalling all of them and the world just seems black because you've never sat down and written it down.

So I really want this show to be a resource and an encouragement for you, especially if you're in a place of financial stress. And I've been there. Who knows? Maybe I'll be there again. I'm a little bit there right now. I'm not as broke as I once was, but I just – when I don't want to dip into savings to fund my lifestyle, then it puts me in a situation of saying, "How do I make the business go and what are the difficult decisions that I need to make?" So I can relate afresh to even the content that I'm desiring to share with you today.

The budgeting system that I'm about to share with you is simple and if not completely free, very, very cheap. You're going to need just a couple of things. You're going to need a couple of pieces of paper. You're going to need a checkbook register and a pencil. A calculator.

Use the one on your phone if you don't have one. And you're going to need access to your bank accounts, which you're probably going to have set up on your phone. And what I'm going to instruct you in today is a budgeting process that is very, very manual. You hear a lot about the benefits of automating your finances and I believe there's a powerful case to make for automating your finances.

If you've already established good habits and practices and if you're coming from a place of being in control. Let me use for a moment, let me use a dieting example, a way of eating example. If you are a skilled athlete and you are a very healthy person, you know all the different things that you need to eat, you know all the different things that you need to do and you have excellent habits that are built into you.

Well, in that situation, you can just pretty much put your eating life on autopilot. But if you're not that person, if you're fat, if you make bad choices, if you aren't familiar with what the content is of the food that you're eating, at least in the beginning stages, you've got to go the other way.

You've got to get yourself in a situation where you can say, "I know what is in every bite." And you got to get very, very tactical so as to make each decision afresh to you. I've had experiences in the past, whether it was at a time when I was fasting completely from all food or it was in a time where I was cutting out a certain element out of my diet and I noticed during one of those periods of time how often I had the urge to dip into the candy jar on a co-worker's desk.

Because when I had taken an extreme perspective and cut it out completely, then I was very, very aware of it. I sat back and looked at it and said, "Man, I had no idea how many times per day I had that urge to go and take some M&Ms out of the candy jar." Well, the same thing with finance.

Many of us have financial habits that are built into us where we're consistently in the habit of buying this little thing there, spending this little money on the other place. And if those habits are good, then that's fine. But if the habits are not good, you would be shocked at how much money can leak out of your budget.

And so I think that the concept of automating your finance is incredibly powerful if you're in a good place. But if you're not, you've got to go the--. I would recommend to you, you don't have to do anything, I would recommend to you that you un-automate everything and that you make everything manual so that you're forced to step in and take control.

That's the key. Make everything manual so that you're forced to step in and take control. Once you've established the skill of being fully in control of your finances, then you can go in and you can automate things in order to free up a little bit more time for you to focus on other things.

But if you automate bad behavior, you're sunk. So step in and take control. Now, it wouldn't hurt you to take very careful control from now for the rest of your life, but I do recognize that most people won't do it. And that's okay. You don't necessarily always have to count every single micro and macro nutrient once you've established a good baseline.

But if you're in a difficult place, you do. And so I recommend to you that you take control. So let's get to what to do. And as a reminder, I'm specifically targeting today somebody who is either money is tight for various reasons or you're finding yourself in a situation where you're falling behind on bills, maybe something has changed, the reason doesn't matter.

But when you get in a situation where money is tight, I would recommend to you that you simplify everything and you make everything manual. So here are your steps. Number one, you need to eliminate all automatic payments from your life and from your budget. So the very first thing that you should do is call any credit cards that you have, call your bank that issues any debit cards, and request a completely new card number.

Now, you don't necessarily have to take this step. You could go through and manually cancel and change all of the automatic payments with the individual providers. But if you're in a situation where you're just – you got your back up against the wall, best thing to do, just call a credit card company, say, "I've lost a card and I need a new one," and have them issue you a new one with a new number.

That way, all of the automatic payments that are currently set to be paid off of your credit cards and off of your debit cards will immediately be canceled. If you need to, if you have any automatic payments on your checking account, most of us don't or if we do have automatic payments, as usual in the couple, it's kind of a hassle to change checking account numbers in this way, especially you might have things like direct deposit or other things set up.

Usually, with checking accounts, it would be better for you just to change it on the provider's end. But if you have a lot of things automatically being paid that are a pain to cancel or you don't have direct deposit set up where it's going to be a hassle to change that, then go ahead and change your checking account number as well.

Close one account and open a new account. The goal is we want to take control. So the worst thing that can happen in people's lives when people are struggling with money, when they're down to their last dollar for whatever reason, the worst thing that can happen is somebody that you owe money to and you just owe a bill payment, your electric bill, whatever, they come in and all of a sudden, you're about to go down to the store and buy groceries and you check your account balance and all of a sudden, the electric company took the money out of your account.

That's a bummer because then it means you don't have any money to buy groceries and you always have to prioritize what you're going to do with money. So change the credit card numbers, change the debit card numbers, change the checking account numbers if you need to. Just make sure that there are no automatic payments happening on your account.

Next, get a checkbook register. I don't know if you are familiar with what these things are. They're from about 1942 but they're these little things about the size of a check. You may or may not know what a check is but it got all these little columns and these little squares in it.

You need one of those and they're free to get. Trot down to any bank that's near you and just ask a teller for a checkbook register and they'll give you one. It doesn't matter whether you bank there or not. Just trot in and ask the teller and say, "I need a checkbook register." Personally, I think one of the biggest losses to people's finances is that nobody uses a checkbook register anymore.

They are unwieldy and there are better solutions as far as easier solutions, easier to manage, electronic solutions. You can do this with an Excel spreadsheet. That's how I've usually done it. But you cannot beat the simplicity of a checkbook register especially as I'm going to tell you how to use it.

The beauty of the checkbook register is it does something that nothing else can do. It allows you to look forward and see your money laid out in a backwards and forwards chronological order. This allows you to project forward different amounts of money. It allows you to say, "Okay, today is January 1 and I've got to get from now through January 15 and I've got to pay these two bills.

One is due on January 5, one is due on January 10. How much money am I going to have left over?" It allows you to go ahead and put those bills in on the checkbook register knowing that the money hasn't been paid out yet but allows you to see, "Okay, once those two bills are paid, how much money am I going to have left over?" Looking at your bank balance which is what most people do who are not skilled with money, just simply look at the bank balance, see if there's money in the checking account, I can go spend it.

That doesn't tell you anything. So the checkbook register is a powerful, powerful tool. I've been through this several times, again, doing coaching with people who are in financial distress and most of them have agreed with me that once you actually can sit down and put dates to your money, it eliminates that question.

It eliminates the insecurity of saying, "Well, I'm just going to be broke," because you know, "Okay, on Thursday this bill is going out and I've got enough money in the account to pay Thursday's bill." As long as you know that there's no money going out of the account unless I actually physically, manually send the money out in the form of a check or an ATM withdrawal or however that works, you know I'm going to have money to pay the bills and that can bring you in a sense of control.

So you need a physical checkbook register. Get one. Next, you need a legal pad or a notebook. You need some place that you can write down on paper the situation that you're facing and have it kept together. My preference would be a bound notebook. Go get a composition book for about 97 cents if you don't have one or any notebook or any sheaf of papers, but ideally it's a notebook.

And you want something where the pages are actually connected so you don't lose things because you're going to start keeping budgets and you want to just have very simple. You don't want to be doing this on an iPad or on a phone or on a computer where the programs are going to crash or you've got to buy something or anything like that.

Just very simple. Get a notebook. A pencil. Checkbook register. And if you have trouble with math, a simple calculator will help. Next, you need to get a folder and print out every single bill and every single payment that you owe for any reason whatsoever and make a stack of all of the bills.

If you're receiving paper bills for your accounts, go ahead and take whatever the latest paper bill is. Make sure you have one bill for each account. If you receive electronic bills, print out physically on paper the electronic bill. If you don't have a printer, get a piece of paper and write down the information from that electronic version of the bill.

So some of you listening, you might not own a computer. You might just simply be doing everything from your cell phone. You don't have a printer, but you still get electronic bills in your cell phone. That's more and more a reality for many people. That's fine. Get a piece of paper.

Write on it, "I owe the electric company on January 1, I owe them $150." And write down, "Electric company due January 1, $150," on a piece of paper. It's very important to have this information physically, tactically there. Not to be going and checking this app and checking this email folder.

Have it on a piece of paper. What you find when you actually do that is because you can actually sit down and look at the information and look at the papers, it's no longer overwhelming. It's no longer hiding in the inbox. It's just a number on a piece of paper, an impersonal number on a piece of paper.

Next, take all of those bills and you're going to organize them based upon their due date. So take their due dates, make a chronological order, put the newest one on top, and keep them organized in that manner. Don't try to write it on a calendar. Don't try to write, "Well, this one's due here." The problem with calendars is you can't actually see the numbers that are associated with it.

So you just want to have the stack of bills. And any time a new bill comes in, slide it in in the right order. Anytime one is paid, you're going to remove it from the stack. Organize all the bills in order of due date. Next step, take the checkbook register, pull out your phone, pull up your bank account, write today's date and the current balance in the balance segment of the checkbook register.

And from now on, because you've started with canceling every single automatic transaction, from now on, every dollar that gets spent, every check that gets written, every bill that gets sent out from your online bill pay, every time you swipe your card, every single thing gets written in that check register at exactly the same time that you buy something.

If you're not in the habit, take your card, your debit card, and your checkbook, slide them into the register and put a rubber band around it so you cannot actually spend money on the debit card without actually taking money out and writing it on the checkbook register. You need to know at all times exactly how much money is in the checking account.

So that if I come by and all of a sudden it's 3 a.m., I need to be able to wake you up at 3 a.m., shake you in your bed and say, "Tom, Susan, how much money is in your checking account?" And you immediately grab the checkbook register, which is on the nightstand beside you, and you say, "Ah, there's $463 in the checkbook register." It's very important.

Tip for you, if you're married, working out of a joint account, this will be the situation for many of you where both spouses are spending out of the account. Number one, ideally in a moment we're going to try to put some of those things over to cash so we don't have to face this, but if you're married and working out of a joint account, one person needs to manage the checkbook.

One person needs to have the checkbook within two feet of them at all times in physical proximity. The other person who's going to make an expenditure needs to send a text message before any expenditure with the amount to make sure that that money is in there when they're going to make it.

So there needs to be a text message before the expenditure to make sure there's money in the account sufficient to make the payment. And then after the expenditure, you need to send an additional text message with the information on what was purchased, how much it was, and when the transaction occurred because it needs to go in there at the exact moment of the expense.

Okay, I'll give you five minutes on either side. Hopefully this is useful. I'm being very precise, but these things are important. If you've got thousands of dollars extra that you keep in the checking account, that's fine. You can reconcile the accounts in a day or two. But when you're working with dollars and pennies, you can't run the risk of incurring a $35 overdraft charge.

So it needs to be done and taken care of immediately. So in the checkbook register, you have today's date, you have current balance, and you have a total amount of money in the account. Next, pull out the notebook. At the top of it, write today's date. Write down current balance at the top right of the page and put those numbers there.

You're going to organize that page exactly like you do the checkbook register. Next, take each of the bills that are in your handful of bills, and you're going to write them down on the page in order of chronology. So on the left-hand column of the page, it says January 1.

The first bill is due January 6. Skip several lines between the initial number. Write January 1. Skip three or four lines. Write January 6, electric bill due, $167. Then skip a few more lines. Write January 9, cell phone bill due, $100. Next, go down and skip a few lines.

Write in each of the bills on that sheet of paper. Rent due, mortgage due, you get the point. Put the entire list of all of the bills on the sheet of paper and then set the stack of bills aside. Then look at your pay schedule and figure out when any paycheck of any amount is going to be received into your household.

So you might be paid on the 1st and the 15th. Your spouse might be paid on the 5th and the 20th. Estimate those numbers and go ahead and write them in on that sheet of paper. You're probably dealing with about a month or so of chronology on that paper depending on how many bills, how far out your bills are.

Because you're dealing with current bills, they're probably all due within about a month. We're going to go with this process as far as we can go even if it's just to the next paycheck. But you're probably dealing with about a month, which is fine. Write down each of the paychecks.

So if you get paid on the 5th, write January 5. That's why we skipped some lines. Write Tom's paycheck and put in the amount. And you're going to put these columns here with pluses and minuses in exactly the same way it's laid out on the checkbook register. So you've got your pluses and your minuses and your balance.

Then take a look at that piece of paper and ask yourself, "What other money do you need to spend for things that are missing on that paper?" There's probably just a few things. Number one, it's food. We don't ever receive bills for food, but we do need a certain amount of food and that's very important.

So ask yourself how much, just guess if you can, but ask yourself how much you actually spend on food. Let's say it's $100 a week. Go ahead and figure out when are you going to go shopping. Take a look at the calendar. So if Friday is January 7 and you go shopping on Friday nights, then write January 7, write $100.

Other things that are probably missing would be things like gas. Try to figure out how much do I spend on gas and when am I going to do it. So if you fill up the car usually on Saturday, take a look and see if you can put $40 in there for gas on Saturday morning.

Write that in on one of the lines that was missing. Go through and try to think of anything else that you're missing. Next, total the columns up and the goal is to see, "Okay, if I've got $1,000 in the account right now minus a $200 bill three days from now minus $100 on Friday to pay for food minus $40 on Saturday morning and then all of a sudden we get another paycheck of $500, just start totaling the numbers down and see if that account dips to below zero or see if we have money left at the end of the bills.

Hopefully there's money left. If there's not, you're going to need just to go as far as you can. We'll come back to this in a moment. But hopefully there's money left. In an ideal world, that's the situation that you face. When there's money left, then you can go back and you can look and you can try to figure out, "All right, where would I like to spend a little bit of extra money?" Maybe on Friday we'd like to go out to eat, so you put down $25 to go out to eat on Friday and you write that in on the notebook paper.

Whatever it is, maybe you'd like to send more money to the debt payments, doesn't matter. You just go ahead and slide those things in. The goal is to be able to cover out the coming month or the cycle of bills that you have in your hand. Now, at this point in time, the budgeting process starts to diverge depending on the situation.

I'm going to quickly reach the end of what I can do in an audio discussion format. But after you have written those things out on the piece of paper, then you're going to go ahead and just start tracking the transactions. If the bill is due to the electric company in three days, you're going to go ahead and write the check.

When you write the check, you write the check number, the amount, the bill, to whom it was paid in the checkbook register, and you total that account balance in the checkbook register. You start to record those transactions. Here's where we get into a number of goals for what you want to accomplish with the checkbook register.

But this process is the most fundamental basic budgeting process that can be had. If I were in a situation where I was in intense financial distress, I would be doing this budgeting process at least weekly as far as on the pages where I'm constantly writing it down, refreshing it, writing down the bills, seeing what's due.

I would definitely be doing it weekly at least until I'm current on all of the bills and have enough money to where I'm able to comfortably pay the bills and comfortably make those other transactions. My recommendation is if you're in a situation where things are that tight, you definitely want to move some of the expenditures over to cash.

This will help. Let's say that you know, "Okay, Friday I'm going to spend $100 on groceries." What I would do is I would go ahead and I would swing by the ATM, pull out $100 of cash, and then here's our grocery budget. We're going to spend this with $100 of cash.

That helps you when you're not near zero. That helps you to not overdraft your account because it may be I've been in these situations and help people in these situations where you've got $3.67 of a balance in your checking account. As long as you are fanatical about keeping that checkbook register current and making sure that you're not making any payments until there's money in the account, you can run this thing down to $0.03 without any danger because you're keeping track of it.

It will help you to implement some habits of making sure that you're diligently, consistently checking your checking account. What I would do, install your bank's app on your phone every single night before you go to bed, sit down at your desk or at your kitchen table, pull up your bank's app, make sure that there's all the transactions that are listed in the account are carefully recorded and reconciled in the checkbook register.

Then you can shut it down and go on your way. If there's any need to spend money that's not on that yellow piece of paper, you've got to put it on the yellow piece of paper first. Yellow was because there's a legal patent. You got to put it on the notebook first.

Then you've got to rework all of the math. If you get to the point and you say, "Okay, wait a second. We're going to do something special on Saturday and we're going to spend $97," then you redo the entire page with all of the bills and all of the estimated expenses before you spend the money until you get to a point where you've got enough money in the checking account where you could comfortably do those things.

Then we move to a different type of budgeting. This type of budgeting is very, very effective. It's very, very effective when you are in a situation where you have shortfalls because it helps you to be very tactical with knowing when and where the money is coming in and when and where the money is going out.

If you need to juggle, you do all of the juggling on that piece of paper. You might reach a point where you're juggling. You can't make a payment. In that situation, you choose the payment that's going to be the least impactful to your life to skip. Here I would go with Dave Ramsey's priorities of you don't skip food.

You don't skip paying the utilities. If you have to, you skip the credit cards. You keep your rent paid. You keep your mortgage paid. But if you have to, you start with food, utilities, gas in the car so you can get to work, housing expenses. If you've got to be behind, don't pay the student loans.

Get behind on those but don't not have any groceries in the refrigerator, things like that. If you've got to skip though, this gives you the power to say, "Okay, I've got to skip or I've got to be a few days late." You can see it all on that paper.

It also gives you the time and the opportunity to say, "How much money do I need by that date?" Maybe you can go and you can sell something and come up with the extra money and you can add in an additional credit there to that account. The point is this type of budgeting is very, very effective to get you going from paycheck to paycheck and making sure that you don't run out of money between the paychecks.

The next step after this type of budgeting, we'll talk about another day, but that's where you would get to the concept of monthly budgeting, of knowing, "Okay, in this coming month, I know where these are the expenditures that I'm going to have. Here's the cash and starting to spend." We'll move into that maybe in a future show.

But when you're in a position of financial constraint, you may not even be able to go month to month. You may have to go day to day, week to week. Take heart if you're in that situation because the process of carefully recording your data in the checkbook register and then carefully writing things out in the notebook page, list it out chronologically in the way that I have, that's exactly the same process that you're going to be doing when you're a multimillionaire.

It's just there's going to be some bigger numbers. But it's no different in that process. So being diligent with what you have where you are is going to train you to be more effective down the road. If you are in financial distress, my closing encouragement to you would be this.

Be diligent to take this control on a very physical basic level. Don't pursue any electronic solutions. Within a week or two, a couple of weeks, I'm going to be doing some interviews and launching with Jesse Meek, I'm founder of YNAB, which is an excellent budgeting piece of software. I'm going to be bringing him on the show to talk about YNAB.

It's one of the more powerful budgeting softwares. You, the audience, love it. I've received tons of recommendations to bring it on as an affiliate link and I'm in the process of working out those details. But I'm going to be bringing him on. If you are in, my encouragement though, if you're in extreme distress, you don't need a budgeting software.

You don't need an electronic solution. You don't need an app. You don't need any of that stuff. You need a piece of paper and a checkbook register. And the key value of it is because it'll train you to take control. And when you take back control and you diligently manage what you do have, that process will train you to be able to accumulate more for the future.

Hope this is useful to you. I'm trying to keep this short and precise. At some point, I'd like to do a video on this. It's far easier to explain in a video format or a visual format. But for today, I felt it was important to do it in an audio format.

And I hope that it was effective enough to help you if you're in this situation or to be of help to somebody else if you wanted to share it with them in this situation. If you've got any comments or feedback, I would be happy to hear it on today's show.

If you've got solutions and ways of doing things that you find effective, go ahead and do that. In the future, in coming days, we will talk about other ways of budgeting. We'll talk about automating everything. I think that's a powerful thing, but not when you're in distress. And this system, by the way, you don't ever have to outgrow it.

You'll outgrow it in the sense of having to carefully predict out each and every expenditure. If you keep a buffer of a few thousand bucks in the checking account, there's no reason for you to do this each and every, to track every single dollar on that piece of paper.

That's the point of getting to a buffer, so you don't have to do that. But still, keeping a checkbook registered, keeping a single account, paying the bills manually helps you to never have overruns. The bills that come out of my accounts automatically, I don't look at them as much as I should.

And so, from time to time, I'll go back through and I'll just do an audit of all the bills. And this can be a really useful way to do it. So, hopefully this will be a helpful resource for you. Thank you all so much for listening. If this has been beneficial for you and you would like to support the show, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

Sign up to become a direct patron of the show. That's my primary method for being able to pay the bills and continue to bring you the content that I'm able to bring you. So, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. I've got a number of bribes and awards there for you at different levels.

Everything from a buck a month to a couple hundred dollars a month. Thank you to each and every one of you, almost 200 of you who do support the show there. I thank you for that. Oh, also, one other request. If you wouldn't mind, please, wherever you listen to the show, could you leave the show a review?

If you listen on Stitcher, if you listen on iTunes, could you leave a review for the show? If you use our app, the Radical Personal Finance app, could you go in the app store on iTunes or go in the app store on Android or the Play Store, wherever you get the show and leave a review for me?

I would greatly appreciate it. Working hard to increase the marketing of the show and the best marketing is word of mouth and is also those reviews. So, thank you to each and every one of you who are listening. I'll be back with you soon. Cheers, y'all. Thank you for listening to today's show.

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This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment, but your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

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