EPISODE 9: Get Organized: The First Step to Financial Intimacy

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THE LOWDOWN

Hey everyone, Jess here! In our latest episode of "Sex and Money with Jess," we dove into the crucial first step of my three-part process for achieving financial intimacy: organization. I shared my passion for getting up close and personal with your finances, just like you would in a relationship, to build a strong foundation for growth and understanding.

We talked about the importance of not just knowing your balances but understanding the transactions behind them. Whether it's your savings, checking, or credit card accounts, I emphasized the need to categorize each transaction to see where your money is truly going.

I shared my love for spreadsheets and how they can be a simple yet powerful tool for organizing your finances. I also mentioned other options like Quicken, QuickBooks, and various apps, but I stressed the value of manually inputting transactions to stay fully engaged with your spending.

I encouraged you to make the organization process enjoyable—put on some music, take breaks, and maybe even dance a little! Remember, starting now can change your future, so grab those bank statements and begin categorizing your transactions.

Next week, we'll explore the second part of the process, which is all about familiarizing yourself with your finances. Until then, have fun organizing, and don't hesitate to reach out if you need help or want to share your progress. Love you all, and thanks for tuning in!

MENTIONED IN SHOW:

Website: www.lovealwaysjess.com/getstarted

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_sexuality

SHOW NOTES:

Episode begins at [00:00:54]

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Hey, I hope that your week is going well. I'm excited about today's episode because [00:01:00] today we're going to start diving in to my process for becoming intimate with your finances. You've probably heard me use that phrase periodically throughout the past eight episodes. And truly that is what I think is the foundation for any personal finance, understanding, growth, or any mixture of the two.

The reason I call it financial intimacy is because intimacy requires you to get close. and get deep with somebody else when we look at it from a person on person perspective. The same thing needs to happen with our finances.

We have to get close to the numbers. We have to get deep with the numbers and build an understanding, a foundation, and truly intimacy with them.

I have a three part [00:02:00] process that I utilize when it comes to my personal finances. Becoming intimate with your numbers. Isn't going to happen right off the bat because to become intimate you have to know them you have to become aware Of all the bits and pieces that add together within your own financial portfolio

Now you might be thinking, I just need to pull up my bank statement, or even just my bank account balance, or my credit card balance, and I'll have an understanding of where I'm at. I have 5, 000 in my savings, 1, 000 in my checking, 3, 000 on a credit card. So, I'm at a net 6, 000 positive. Sure, that gives you a snapshot of where you're at, at this day [00:03:00] and time,

but do you know what makes up that balance? Do you know the types of transactions that are going through your bank account, that are going through your credit card? Do you know the stocks that You're invested in and maybe your investment account. Do you know what's in your retirement account? There's a lot of things transactions that make up the balances And so when we just look at the balances, we aren't truly able to inform ourselves about the ongoings within our accounts.

And this is why I always begin my financial review process with organization. To me, organization really is the foundation. Without organizing the [00:04:00] money, And the transactions that you have going through your various accounts, you're not going to truly have the full picture.

I believe part one of any financial process should be sitting down. Organizing your financials. It's similar to every single year when you sit down to do your taxes. You have to organize things. You have to gather receipts, gather pay stubs. You have to gather all types of different information depending upon what you're submitting for your taxes,

and then you have to organize it. You have to figure out which forms you use for your income, which forms you use for your expenses. How do you prove that you have dependents, all of that organizing before inputting into your taxes needs to happen. And [00:05:00] just like with that process, we have to organize our personal finances to be able to inform ourselves about the ongoings and then be able to make an informed decision from that information.

Now there are a lot of different ways that you can organize your finances. My favorite way is using an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Docs spreadsheet and

inputting the valuable information. This is date of transaction, who you paid or were paid from, the dollar amount, that was either an expense or an income, as well as Any notes for yourself. So like if you were paying something on Venmo, put in a note what you were paying through Venmo. Because you're not going to remember down the road whether or not you paid a friend back for food, or you paid a manicure [00:06:00] shop for your nails.

You won't know without the memo. And to me, the most important piece of information to include is the type of expense or type of income category.

The category is going to allow you to organize your expenses and your income into categories, that was just replicating the word. It's going to allow you to put them in little buckets

to label the type of spending. So your car. You can have things such as fuel, maintenance, car payment, insurance, and it's all related to your car. And then when you're looking down the road to see how much money you've spent, you can look at car as a whole, or you can look at car by individual category. It also allows you to determine Rent versus other [00:07:00] housing expenses, or if you're out with friends and you want to itemize your receipt by the type of entertainment you're going to, whether or not it's a movie or going dancing,

categorizing things allows you to see where your money is going. I think that is the most vital piece of information that you can input when you're organizing your finances. As I mentioned, I prefer using an Excel spreadsheet, or I also use, I believe, Quicken.

QuickBooks is another option.

Quicken and QuickBooks are computer softwares that you can utilize to track your spending. And that's something that as I've advanced in my financial journey, I've started to utilize. But if you're new to this organizing and this becoming intimate with your finances, like I [00:08:00] said, Excel, easy, super easy.

Add a few columns, add a few rows, you get a total. If that's something you're interested in, but don't know how to put together, please Head to my website, lovealwaysjust. com, and I have workbooks on there for sale. Also, if that workbook doesn't work for you, but you need help, please, please, please reach out to me, and I can help create something for you.

Outside of those easy forms to use, because Google Sheets is free, Excel, if you have it on your computer already, obviously free. There are apps that are geared towards organizing your finances. I personally am not a huge fan of using apps, , When I organize my finances, I personally [00:09:00] like to manually input the expense or the income because then if I don't remember what it was, I can sit and in that moment, go through emails, think back to that day and try to figure out what the expense was

instead of relying on an app to do that for me, but also the apps don't necessarily categorize things correctly. If it's not a common vendor, or for instance your Venmo, it's not going to know what type of spend you did. Obviously if it's something like Walmart, Target, Pizza Hut, Olive Garden, it's going to know how to categorize that stuff.

But for the other things? that aren't as common, it might not. And so it might put it in the wrong category. I have seen this happen on apps. I have [00:10:00] also seen this happen in other financial websites that I've used. Um, and you often have to go through each transaction. and re establish the correct category.

To me, that seems more tedious than just typing the info in in 30 seconds in an Excel spreadsheet or manually inputting that information into a software for the computer. The other thing I like about using um, Excel or A financial software on the computer that you manually input things in is it allows a reconciliation, um, process.

And so at the end of every single month, I get my bank statement and I go through each transaction and confirm that it matches the bank. And if there are any discrepancies, I look into it. I call the credit card company. I call my [00:11:00] bank. And I talked to them about it, and sometimes things get resolved.

Other times, I made a boo boo and just have to fix it.

If using the app or a financial app is the way that you want to go, that's fine. That's what makes you happy, but I encourage you to go in at least once a week, or at least once a month, and go through each transaction, check the category that it's under, ask yourself, did that really happen, because that's what makes you happy.

Bye. Mistakes do happen. There are errors. We know that technology isn't perfect, so maybe there's something a glitch with the app, or maybe one of your accounts isn't connecting properly, or it's possible that there was a charge that you didn't do.

Organizing your finances can be done [00:12:00] multiple ways. What makes sense to you? may not make sense to somebody else and vice versa. So when it comes to organization, ask yourself, what feels good to me? What do I understand? What is going to be easiest for my life?

And then from there, begin the process. Sit down one day a week, open up your bank account, put everything into a spreadsheet, or connect your accounts to an app,

and begin to go through the different transactions. Familiarize yourself with those transactions. Get it all into one area, one spot. That way you don't have to on any given day go and open three, four, five different accounts and add everything together and say, yes, that's my balance right now. Maybe you begin [00:13:00] collecting receipts.

And then once a week, you sit down at your computer and you input those receipts into your spreadsheet. And then at the end of the month, you go through, check it against the bank. Maybe you forgot a receipt here and there. Maybe you write a check and you input that into your bank or into your Excel spreadsheet.

And then at the end of the month, see if that check is cleared. And this is why organizing is important, because I know checks are kind of obsolete at this point, but we often have to write a check here or there every once in a while, and sometimes we might forget that we've mailed that check, and then when we go in our bank account, we go, oh, I have this amount of money left, not thinking that the check hasn't cleared yet,

or not thinking that maybe Why are you sent? Hasn't left the bank yet. And then the next thing you know is you're overdrafting. [00:14:00] And we don't want that. So in putting all different types of transactions into some sort of spreadsheet when it happens or right before it happens so that you 100 percent on top of all the different pieces and movements that are going on within your accounts.

will help you stay true to what your balance actually is. Because the bank account, the credit card, might not be 100%. If you go in and you look at your bank accounts or your credit card statement sometimes, you'll see the word pending, and that means it hasn't hit yet. So that balance that you're seeing excludes that value.

And we don't often think to look at those pending items, we tend to just take the face value, and this is why organizing is important, [00:15:00] because it includes the pending items. And it also allows you to

truly capture what each transaction is for. So part one of my process is the organization part. It's the most tedious part and it's probably, for a lot of people, the most boring. I thoroughly enjoy it because I love money and I love spreadsheets. Which is why, like I said, if you need help creating something that works for you, please reach out to me.

You can hire me to create it. I will have a lot of fun , and if it's what helps you get organized, then that makes me even more ecstatic.

The next part to my process, we will dive into more on the next couple of episodes, but just a brief preview. Part one is organization. Part two is [00:16:00] where you become intimate with your finances and familiarize yourself with them. And then part three is planning for the future, which part three tends to be a lot of fun for people.

So if you have any questions on today, feel free to reach out. But I encourage you to sit down at some point this week and print off those bank statements, download the credit card statements, open an app if that's the route you decide to go, and create an Excel spreadsheet that's simple, easy to use, And begin organizing every single transaction that you have going.

Once the organization is done, then the fun begins to happen. We're not quite past what some might call the scary part, but

the organization will help with that. Because in order to go from where you're at to where you want [00:17:00] to be, You have to be able to see every single detail, and then you can begin planning, and correcting, and figuring it all out from there.

Have fun with the organization process. Put on your favorite TV show, put on some music, type in a few transactions, get up and dance, sit back down, type in a few more. It's not meant to be five hours of sitting down and being bored out of your mind. Make it fun. Do an hour here. Do one account today, do another account tomorrow, but begin the process now.

We talked about that a few weeks ago. Starting now will change your future. So begin the organization. I will be back here next week to talk about familiarizing yourself with the numbers. Until then, focus. on organizing. Have a great rest of your day and [00:18:00] your week. I love you.