My husband and I used to religiously budget each month. I know budget is usually a noun, but we worked so hard at it that I’m using it here, today, as a verb. Shortly after getting married and having our first son, my parents introduced us to Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. It couldn’t have come at a better time

We had a mortgage, a car payment, student loans, and now, a child – which we were quickly discovering was a very, very expensive endeavor. Add to this line up of debt that we were both public school educators. In Wisconsin. It was 2010, the year our Governor stripped our ability to have a union which effectively froze our pay scale and simultaneously raised our cost of insurance. Suddenly the “promise” of a yearly raise (to meet the cost of living) and supreme benefits vanished.

We were pretty much doomed unless we learned how to budget.

It was a lot of work, but the results were AMAZING. Within two years we paid off all of our debt (except for our mortgage), and in the process learned how to cut unnecessary spending. In the next three years we continued to improve our financial habits and save. It was wonderful. We bought and paid off another car and saved enough to take an incredible family trip to Disney World.

But then we fell off the wagon. We moved and got higher paying jobs. We only had one child in daycare. We continued (for the most part) our good spending habits. Suddenly our need to budget wasn’t quite so urgent.

At our new house we failed to establish a new budgeting routine. We got busy. When I left my full-time job for part-time teaching and the world of entrepreneurship, my income fluctuated each month, wildly. Budgeting became more complicated. And for all of these reasons, we quit budgeting. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It just kind of happened and we didn’t do anything to fix it.

And the honest truth is – we were fine. But recently my husband and I decided that we were tired of being FINE. We want to be GOOD, no better than that, we want to be GREAT. The turning of the calendar often prompts people to pursue a new goal. This common desire coupled with a recent boost to the stability of my authorpreneur income has inspired us to budget again.

For Christmas I received a copy of Christy Wright’s Business Boutique.

Business Boutique is a life-changing handbook from the heart of Christy Wright, creator of the Business Boutique movement. It offers a step-by-step plan to take the ideas in your head and turn them into a business that brings some serious income. Stop treating your desires and gifts like an afterthought and start chasing your dreams! Business Boutique will show you how to:

Create a customized plan to start and grow your business
Manage your time so you can have a business—and life—you love
Simplify the overwhelming business stuff like pricing, taxes and budgeting
Market to the right people the right way
Sell with confidence

Christy is a team member of the Dave Ramsey line up and I knew that if I wanted to get back on the budget train (and clean up my business finances), she was the one I wanted to learn from. I’ve done a lot of deep diving and learning in the entrepreneur arena over the past year, so to find something at this stage of the game that completely lights up my life and blows my mind is a pretty rare, but the chapter on business finances finally gave me the step-by-step formula I didn’t know I was looking for. With it, I could finally make sense of what I was supposed to do with the money coming into my business. (Side note, if you are brand new to the small business world or are wanting to take your side gig to the next level, this is definitely the book to help you start your journey!)

I used Christy’s formula to create this sheet.

You can grab your editable copy of these budgeting sheets here.

By dutifully filing in my income and expenses and then flexing the other side of my word nerd brain to do a little simple math, I can take my fluctuating income and quickly arrive at a number that (on the sheet) I call MY PAYCHECK. I can not only plug this number into our family budget, but also arrive at thoughtful amounts to set aside for taxes, emergencies and future businesses expenses. THANK YOU, CHRISTY WRIGHT!

Hopefully, the combination of this new knowledge and self-designed tool, along with a renewed desire to make our money work for us, 2021 can be more than fine. Hopefully with some planning and hard work (both verbs!) we will make 2021 great!

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