The Freelancer's Guide to Automated Budgeting | Back To Basics

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 253

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome. Thank you so much for checking this podcast out. There are millions of other podcasts you could listen to, and I'm grateful that you have chosen this one for some strange reason. This is the right podcast for you if you are a freelancer trying to earn more money from your creative skills and you want to do it preferably without selling your soul. That sounds like you're in the right place. If you are a new or you're a returning listener, you are an episode like three or four of our series on going back to the basics right now.

And this episode, I am excited to talk about something that I haven't ever talked about before on the show and something that frankly I sucked at before in my past. We're going to talk about judging off the title. I'm sure you already know this. We're going to talk about budgeting. But before you turn this off, before you run away, before you're like, Oh, God, I don't want to talk about budgeting. This is the most painstaking thing on earth. Bear with me, bear with me, because my approach to this is a lot different than most people's. My approach to this before is probably still better than what you're doing right now.

So you'll probably take something away from this episode that is tangible, is actionable, something you can actually do. And it could be a relatively short episode bite size. That's my goal for these back to the basics episodes.

My goal for you is to make sure that you have more money than month.

That's a stupid phrase where you always feel like, I feel like I got more month than money. At the end of the month, I never have any money. Well, if that sounds like you and you feel like you're that way, this episode is going to help you with that for your business specifically. You can take elements of this probably, but this is really just specifically for business owners and even more specifically freelancers. Now, here's a note. Budgeting can be complex. You can make it really just like this crazy web of things that you must do.

And for certain like engineer type brains, that's like the natural approach you'll take to your budgeting. You'll have this crazy spreadsheet with projections and whatever. That's not my approach. I take a dead simple approach to budgeting, something that I think anyone can do.

And it's probably better than what you're doing right now, because in most cases, most freelancers have no budget for the business at all. They're just aimlessly spending money. They don't know where that money went. They have no plan, no process, no method for what they're doing. And more than anything, they have no intention for their money.

And money without an intention, without a plan, without anything that it's intended for, is doing to just disappear. And I know that many people, they feel like their money just disappears. And some people, they even have really good months, five, six, seven, eight, nine, $10,000 months, and then they just don't have any money. They don't even know where it went. And if they ever actually investigate where that money went, they're always surprised. Like, really, I spent this much on that piece of gear, or I spent this much on that software I never even use anymore. So it just seems to disappear. You never seem to have any money. Well, this episode, we're going to try to address that.

And we're going to try to do it in an automated way. That way, you never spend what you don't have. You feel secure and safe as a freelancer, which a lot of us struggle with this. The reason you're probably listening to the show is because something's happening in your business where you don't feel safe. You don't feel secure. You don't feel like you have a healthy, happy business.

And honestly, if we get our budget right and we have enough money in the bank to where we're making decisions from a place of abundance instead of scarcity, we can be better creatives because we're not worried about paying bills at the end of the month. So that is my pitch to you on this episode. Hopefully you're interested. So let's talk about creating a budget for your business.