hi everybody and welcome to budgeting 101 I'm J Copeland and I'm gonna be
taking you through a five-part series on budgeting money management and general
financial literacy, I want to preface this presentation with the knowledge
that it doesn't take anyone with any kind of experience to understand the
concepts we're going to be going through here in fact the information is aimed at
a very beginner level of getting into understanding your financial situation
and how to manage your money as a post-secondary student or recent
graduate who is trying to set themselves up for the the best success possible in
terms of paying off those student loans that you might have from the years of
studying and getting yourself on track to make sure that you're financially
secure as quickly as possible. So today's session we're gonna be
starting off with a foundation for money management which always starts with a
little bit of knowledge, which is tracking your spending. So a quick
introduction to money management, it seems complicated and difficult and like
it's a problem for the future as we've previously talked about, so what I need
you to realize is getting a handle on your finances now is gonna serve you
better in the long run, the better you understand how your money is being spent,
where it's coming from, and the areas in which you might be overspending or can
create reductions in spending to have yourself, you know, free up a little bit
of extra cash for whatever you might need it for, is gonna give you the
foundation for financial success. So with that understanding knowledge is power
I'm sure you've heard it before. You can't begin to create a budget or
spending plan that's gonna be any kind of, you know, effect for you without first
knowing where your money is going and how much you're spending on a regular
basis. So, to find this information out you're gonna need to track your spending
I recommend starting with a month, I would break this down on like a week by
week basis to start because ultimately you want to know what your expenses are
for the year, you're gonna come up with some costs that don't occur every month
like when your tuition is due is a larger payment that's not due every
single month but you know starting with the monthly spending is going to allow
you to see what kind of of costs you're incurring over the
course of the year in areas that, you know, you can possibly make adjustments
to. Tuition is gonna be the cost of tuition you know what that is well in
advance but you know you're spending on like going out to eat versus say
preparing your own food at home is gonna be something you can manage on a monthly
basis that frees up a little bit of extra cash to take care of those larger
expenses. So there's a couple of ways we can do this if you're
old-fashioned you can keep all of your receipts and use a spreadsheet to,
you know, to track your spending over the course of a month you can download an
app from your bank, I personally use TD MySpend, I have friends who have used
BMO MoneyLogic, there's others out there. One that I did want to recommend
in addition, was Mint which is an independent sort of financial tracker
and budgeting app that people are well, they're very happy with the
performance of it allows you to sort of set savings goals and create
plans for how you can like create money or save in terms of like the long run to
reach those goals, but there's also features on it where you know these apps
can send you push notifications on a daily basis to let you know like, hey you
you spent a little bit more yesterday than you would normally spend or you're
spending right now is above your average spending or even you know hey your
spending for this time the month is below your spending and you're doing well.
So that way if you know you know you spent a little bit extra this week
earlier in the week when you're going into the weekend that information is
front of mind and you can say to yourself okay maybe I should plan for
some you know cheaper or free activities I can participate in so my budget kind
of like and my spending evens out to a level that I'm normally at or
comfortable with, or, you know, I want to reduce it so I can save up for a larger
purchase this is the time period where I can like save some money and not
and sort of like bring that curve down a little bit so that I'm in the area where
I am now suddenly spending less money than I would on average. You know,
additionally, you can also review like your bank statements so if you use
online banking, it's easy to open up your account and see what kind of transactions
have taken place over the course of a month and you can use this
information to view months previous so you don't necessarily have to start from
scratch but can just review your spending over the last month and, you
know, figure out where to go from there as early as today, so check to see if
your bank has a budget app or looking to Mint yourself or there's other programs
like it, that's just the one that seems to be the best reviewed, so yeah, let's
let's get started on tracking that spending because the following sort
of four sessions are all gonna rely on you knowing where you're at with your
spending on sort of a monthly basis. So one thing we want you to do
when you're looking at your spending is break it down into categories that you
can find areas where you might be overspending in or help to, like sort of,
I want to say filter where you can identify areas that you might be able to
reduce spending, save money or ultimately, you know, your paying fees
potentially that you might not need to pay. So, some areas that I've suggested
here are shopping this could include anything like clothes, electronics, things
that you purchase that aren't necessarily necessities, they're
more wants than needs, I mean yes, we all need clothes, but do we need the extra
clothes? You know, are we purchasing just because we feel the
need to gratify ourselves. Education, this includes like your tuition any other
fees that might be associated with education, things like your textbooks or
equipment that you might need for class, so, these are fairly set fees
you're gonna need to purchase these in order to succeed,
but there's still areas that we might be able to consider so things like
textbooks are you buying them new versus can you find them used somewhere?
and save a little bit of money there. Your groceries and eating out are sort
of like two competing categories, so eating out is one of the most expensive
areas for post-secondary students, especially if you're living in the
Toronto area with our variety of delicious foods to participate in. It's a
social activity, it's a great way to catch up with people, you know, after
class and make those connections, but it does cost you significantly more than it
would if you were to buy your groceries and prepare your food on your own.
So, we want to create those categories and see where we're spending the
majority of our money, in terms of, you know, what it's what we're using to feed
ourselves. Entertainment is gonna be another category, this category is
primarily your wants so this is like your Netflix subscription, any payments
you're making for online gaming, your phone bill, this is a large area
of spending that we can focus on, like, where we can we can cut costs in, because
a lot of the costs that we find in the entertainment category are sort of like
repetitive on a month to month basis, or we can reduce them in some way so that
they're down to a more manageable level. Next, we have
accommodations, this is like your rent, utilities, I have included internet because
as post-secondary students we often need internet to participate in our studies
so that's sort of a necessary component to having those accommodation payments.
And then, finally, we have, sort of, travel as a breakdown, this is going to include
your transit costs, any if you're a vehicle owner, the various costs
associated with owning a vehicle such as gas, car insurance, any payments that you
might need to make on your vehicle and just sort of maintenance over time so,
a quick look at some statistics get to give us a baseline, the average monthly
cost of living for a canadian undergrad student is two thousand eight hundred
and forty-five dollars and twenty-five cents as of a recent study in
partnership with Course Compare, which is a Canadian comparison marketplace for
education and that is, sort of, what you can expect that most of your peers are
spending sort of on average on a month to month basis, so this gives us a baseline
to prepare for as to like where we need to be allocating our money to make sure
that we can come up with these payments towards making our education,
sort of, work for us. If you're living in Toronto, you know you're actually going
to be experiencing some of the highest costs for education within the country,
you know, when you factor in things such as our transit system and the costs for
renting apartments, in addition to just general tuition costs you're actually
paying some of the high fees in the country if not the highest,
So just note that you can follow the link attached here on the slide to
check some different cities around the country to see what maybe you might
be more expecting to pay if you're in a different region. Now, some tips, tracking
your spending is critical to your success, and a crucial first step in
managing your money. Here are a few tips to help you succeed. We've talked about
the making use of online banking to keep a digital record of your transactions,
review your expenses at the end of each week, make sure you're planning some
time for that and keeping on track of it, it sounds tedious to start, but
again, if you have downloaded one of those budget tracking apps it makes it
super easy for you to do so, it'll give you reports at the push of a button and
you know you've got push notifications giving you regular reminders so that
takes 99% of the work out of it and I highly recommend getting involved in
that. Make note of any consistent or recurring purchases or charges so this
is like monthly subscriptions that you might have to services like Netflix or
your Spotify account and then we can consider ways that you might be able to
reduce those fees. Keep all of your receipts is another way, that way you can
you can double check to make sure that you're being charged what you should be,
and there's no surprises there and then, again, for those apps enable spending
push notifications on budget tracking apps because I can't emphasize this
enough that when I started using it was a game-changer for me in that
suddenly I was just easily more consciously aware of my spending and I
knew when I was experiencing periods of overspending and could reduce that
spending in a short enough amount of time to make a difference. So, just a
quick reference page here this is where we, sort of, cited our sources
for the city expenses and our next presentation is going to be on preparing
a budget, so hopefully we'll see you in session two and we'll get a start on
what you can do now that you've tracked your monthly spending. Quick thank you
for joining us and I hope to see you again soon.