Life Update: We’re Buying a House

We’re buying a house! … So we need a budget!

Buying A House: Today I want to share some of our financial goals, life updates

And will give you a mini wedding update, here we go!

For the past year we’ve been working towards one of our major goals as a couple: Buying a house! We were hoping to get married first,

But since the pandemic derailed our plans (we’re now looking at 2022)

This year has allowed us to focus more on our financial future … but creating (and sticking) to a budget isn’t so easy, so we’ve been using (& loving) the app/service: You Need A Budget!

You Need A Budget is the 3rd similar service I’ve tried over the past few years and by far one of my favorites, so I’m excited to share this story. For starters, they call budgets “spending plans”

A lot of the training and services they offer almost rewire you to think about life planning and spending in a new way that works.

This approach helps make financial planning more approachable & digestible for me!

So here’s how we’re going to afford our first home & some of the steps we took last year:

1 – Paying off debt:

We didn’t have debt other than student loans but we paid those off

2 – Reallocating Wedding Funds:

Instead of touching our Wedding money, we moved that to a separate account, so we can access it again when we get back to planning.

As you know our Summer 2020 wedding was cancelled. At the moment, we’re hoping for Spring 2022, but instead of putting down deposits and down payments we created a budget. Then we worked to create a blueprint of our wedding with our 1st, 2nd and 3rd choice for each vender “flowers, venue, etc” and we won’t make the real decisions until later this year (Spring 2021)! The budget helped us know how much we should be putting away each month towards our wedding and is one of three budgets we have working for us at the moment

3 – Understanding our current income:

So because of how my job is structured,

every month is different. I don’t have a set salary. Some months I make double what I made the month before, and likewise other months I make nearly nothing. It all nets out but it can be unpredictable and therefore hard to budget. You Need A Budget has helped me figure out a general average and make financial predictions about our income. It has also helped us merge Paris’s day job income with Color Me Courtney incomes seamlessly

4 – Home Budget:

In addition to our everyday budget with our normal expenses (budget #1) our wedding budget (budget #2) we have our home ownership plan (budget #3) this is the one we’ve been working on the most over the past year. We are working together having all three of these plans helped us understand

How much we should be spending on a home,

how much we’ll be spending on our eventual wedding and how much we will be spending the next year to live for general life stuff.

Okay so let me be real clear here… No matter how much money you’re making, you need a budget! I used to be a budget QUEEN … whenI was really poor and couldn’t afford not to. BUT the second I started making money, splurging more & letting up on the budgeting, I started losing more money than before… yikes. Here’s the thing: You don’t need a budget because you don’t have any money, you need a budget so you can do more with the money you have … andddd, if you have money, YOU STILL NEED A BUDGET. If you happen to have a time machine, could you call out 2018 courtney and tell her that? She wasn’t the best at managing her money and she regrets it now!

Tired of stressing over money,

the answer is simple. You need a budget. Even when i was living within our means and making enough money, it would go out the window without a concrete budget. The key to keeping up with your budget (for me) is to make it fun!! With You Need A Budget, the award-winning app and proven method that helps you gain total control of your money and build wealth – YAY!!! For us,

It helped us forget everything we thought we knew about money, and start to experience total control. In addition to the service, YNAB offers free video training and live workshops to help you learn the method, join the community! You can sign up for a free 34-day trial (no credit card required) at www.youneedabudget.com

You can give the 34 day free trial a whirl here, but i also recommend using it in partnership with some of the other free tools they offer.

You’ll find a ton of great tips if you follow their social media or watch their YouTube channel,

but I’ve been really loving the podcast! I hope this post was helpful in starting to get you financially on track! And if you’re already making your money work for you, yay I’m just trying to get on your level!

Big thanks to You Need A Budget For sponsoring this post! And thank YOU for supporting brands who support this blog!