Budget Hack: More Savings Accounts

Video Transcript

Budget Hack: More Savings Accounts

We're all looking for ways to make our budget work better for us. Here's a quick budget hack to help you stick to your budget. I want you to try out using additional bank accounts in order to keep track of your spending. Now, I know this might sound a little weird, maybe a little complex, but it's actually really simple to set up and it’s been something that's helped me keep my spending under check.
 
I think most of us are really use to the traditional way of just having one checking account and one savings account and all of our expenses are going to come out of that one single checking account. But the problem that I found was that most of my monthly expenses were charged on a random date each month. I literally think I don't have two bills that are due on the same day and so in the past, what would happen is I would go out to eat or buy something I had my eye on and then the next thing I know there was this bill that I didn't remember that was set to auto pay taking money out of my account.
 
And so, here's what I did to fix that. I opened up a separate checking account and I used it exclusively for paying my monthly bills. This would include things like phone bills, utilities, streaming services, gym memberships, all of those things that I know I'll pay every month. And then each pay day, I would transfer half of the total cost of my monthly bills into that separate checking account.
 
So, I'm paid twice a month, so this works out for me. But if you're paid monthly, just do one big transfer at the start of the month. But by moving this money out of my primary checking account, it guarantied for one that I would always just have enough money to cover my bills, I don't have to worry about having spent some of that money and now all of a sudden I'm trying to cover it with something else form my savings or pulling out a credit card. It's a really great way of keeping your finances separate and then preventing  accidental over spending situations, especially for those smaller bills that sometimes pop up  and catch us off guard at the end of the month.