Trying New Budgeting Styles | April Paycheck Budget

Our April paycheck budget has a ton of new changes because our lives are different now and it felt like a good time to change up the budget as well! We are now trying out a pay yourself first method which we will soon combine with a percentage based style like 80/20 or 50/30/20. I’ll be sharing more about these as we try new stuff out!

While our lives are so different as we navigate the current financial crisis and global pandemic we’ve adjusted our goals for the year and it felt like a good time to change up how we budget because everything else is different too!

Our main focus for paying ourselves first is our savings for our emergency fund and building up 3 months of expenses because $1,000 is not an emergency fund.

Budget With Me!

In the video you can budget along with me as we cover the budget necessities: bills, fixed expenses, variable expenses, debt payments, and sinking funds.

This is the first time we have implemented the pay yourself first method where we put all of our goals first and make sure those are covered before anything else. That means savings, investing, and debt repayment comes first in our budget before bills of expenses like food and fun.

If you are new to watching our budgets, here’s a little run down of our situation! We both work full time, I do freelance work and earn income from my YouTube channel and this is our take home income that I am budgeting. I cover bills, variable spending expenses, sinking funds and the goals for the month. This month we are super focused on increasing our emergency fund which we are trying to cover 3 months of expenses and eventually even more.

April Paycheck Budget Setup

During this paycheck our main goal was to continue building our emergency fund.

April monthly goals:

  • Save $2,000 for our emergency fund
  • Don’t do unnecessary online shopping

Goals for this paycheck for me were:

  • starting a new type of budget
  • setting up business payments biweekly
  • emergency fund growth

With that in mind we broke down our April 2020 monthly budget into a more specific way for this paycheck budget.

April 2020 Monthly Budget

Here’s the breakdown of the paycheck budget for the first half of April 2020.

Salary$2,599
Extra Income$26
Pennies Not Perfection$400
Total Income$3,259

With $3,259 in planned income for the month we broke it down this way.

Pay Yourself First:

Emergency Fund$1,130
Student Loan$220
Roth IRA$50
Robinhood$10
Ellevest$10

Fixed Expenses:

Mortgage$600
Therapy$130
Netflix$15

Sinking Funds:

Phone$50
Life Insurance$35
Car Insurance$75
Car Repairs$50
House$25
Christmas$25
Emergency Fund Extra$45

Variable Expenses:

Food$350
Gas$50
Medication$30
Birthday$50
J Personal$100
M Personal$50
Giving$100
Misc$50
Buffer in Acct$9

Paying Yourself First

Paying ourselves first is super exciting! Let’s be real, it’s fun to save money and invest money once you realize what that money can do for your in the future.

Paying yourself first isn’t hard it just means prioritizing things like saving, investing, and paying off high interest debt. Paying yourself by doing these things before anything else in your budget is a great way to hit goals.

We plan to continue trying this style of budgeting and see how it helps us better hit all our many goals!

Our Emergency Fund Savings

Because we aren’t playing many different expenses like daycare or going out to eat or going to events or throwing parties (the list goes on) we are able to save a lot more money in our emergency fund!

We recently determined what we need for our emergency fund to equal 3-6 months of expenses.

Looking at our monthly expenses and cutting out many things for an emergency situation means we need roughly $3,000 a month for our expenses. This means for a 3 month emergency fund we will need $9,000 saved. For a 6 month emergency fund we will want to stock up $18,000.

We have a plan for our emergency fund and hopefully things go well and we can save it up with our extra income coming in and big paychecks from the government.

Now with planning to save $2,000 a month we will also be adding a lot of our regular income to our emergency fund. This means we will be able to save up to $9,000 much quicker than I originally expected.

This paycheck we were able to save over $1,000 to the emergency fund which moves us even closer to our goals.

Investing To Hit Goals

While we are prioritizing savings during this time due to potential job security, we are also continuing to invest small amounts into the market and dollar cost average our investments.

One of my goals this year is to max out my Roth IRA and because I haven’t started on that goal yet it felt like a good time to get going on that goal.

I’ve been investing for a long time now and I love investing when markets are going up and when markets are going down. In fact, my shortest time frame investments are for at least 15-16 years from now when I want to use the dividends to help my daughter.

Because I am not investing money for the short term I don’t worry much about the markets year to year ups and downs because I know that in a long time frame that money will continue to grow. That’s why I’m still investing small amounts even when I have bigger goals to achieve, because I know small amounts I won’t miss now will add up to huge amounts later.

I’ve talked a bit about the investing platforms I use for different purposes and here are the ones I plan to use this month:

Because all of thee accounts have different goals and allow me to try out the more popular investing platforms I’m able to try different things and also work toward multiple goals in the far off future.

Trying New Budgeting Styles

I don’t call myself a budgeting expert and probably never will because there are too many styles of budgeting. What works for me for a while doesn’t work for me at another time. What works for me may never work for you.

The thing is that creating a budget and following it during times of uncertainty and times of stability both helps you create a sense of calm and control. And if budgeting doesn’t feel like it’s working for you? Try a different method!

Some people love budgeting by paycheck. Some people love Dave Ramsey’s method. Some people adore YNAB. Some people do 50/30/20 percentage based budgeting. There really are many styles of budgeting and one size does not fit all!

I plant to go through a few more styles of budgeting to see if we can improve on what already works for us. I think it is great to take the best bits of advice from various sources and make them work for you. Best practices from others can improve your life very quickly and that includes with budgeting!

No matter what your goals are, continue with budgeting and using your money wisely and consistently to hit your goals. You don’t have to be perfect with your money but you do need to be consistent!

Mary is the founder of Pennies Not Perfection where she shares her journey to build wealth through online income. She quit her day job in 2021 after she paid off her debt and doubled her 9-5 salary.

Mary's favorite free financial tool is Personal Capital. She uses their free tools to track net worth and work toward to financial freedom.

Her favorite investment platform is M1 Finance, where she built a custom portfolio for free with no fees. She shares her portfolio growth and savings progress every month on YouTube.