Owen Rascovitch

That's right, yeah.

There's no free lunch.

And, you know, regardless of however they're getting paid, if you don't purchase anything, you can still use them for free information and you can do your own research, right?

That's right, exactly.

They probably wouldn't like us saying that, but you can.

Yeah.

So let's jump now into budgeting.

We've got the tools and I suppose in that finance language, the products that we can use to save.

But what good are bank accounts if we don't have, I guess, a budget?

Yeah.

Okay, so let's start.

I think I'll kick this off and say I see a lot of people fail with their budgets because they don't give themselves the right behavioral, I suppose, nudges.

So things like setting up a separate bank account for your emergency savings, something that you can't touch, something that doesn't have a debit card linked to it, really good one.

It just takes away that impulse that you might spend that on whatever you're going to spend it on.

The other one is to think about as you go through getting a budget is to have a float or a little emergency balance.

So what I mean is when people come to me, I say, can you sell items around the house to build up, say, $1,000, $2,000?

And then if something happens while you're getting in the rhythm of budgeting, that can be your fallback.

That's right.

People have these New Year's resolutions and they start on January 1st and then the rego and their health insurance is all due in January and they forgot about that and they haven't got to that amount of, I suppose, budgeting prowess or cash flow that they can then go and pay for those.

So it's really important that you give yourself that opportunity to not be too hard on yourself too and just have that in mind.