768: How Can I Budget When My Income is Inconsistent?

In today’s episode, I am going to be talking about what it looks like to budget when your income is inconsistent. Perhaps your business’ revenue and your pay is inconsistent and you want to create more sustainability across the board so that you can get paid more often and more predictably. I know the economy is insane at the moment and there is a lot happening right now so everything I am going to share with you today is what I would do when I want to have a more conservative approach in a time of uncertainty. I know that this will have an instrumental impact on how you change your business’ finances, create more personal financial stability, and solidify the future health of your business.  I need you to get the idea out of your head that businesses grow linearly or exponentially. They just don’t and you need to embrace these waves of inconsistency. I don’t want you to think that this sort of change means you’re doing something wrong because that isn’t true and running a business is simply too unpredictable. I want to help you find ways to manage these waves of inconsistency. I have been through periods of making huge amounts of money and periods of not even making enough to cover my family’s groceries for the month. In the first few years of running my business, I would take every dollar that would come into the business and use a percentage of it in a certain way, so I got paid when the business got paid. The problem with this is that it is very inconsistent and while it may work early on in the business as the most stable way to handle finances, it won’t work in the long run.  In your developmental years, you need a place to start because those dollars don’t always fall linearly even when you’re doing fantastically! While there are definitely things that you can be doing to create consistency in revenue, that’s not actually what I am going to be talking about today. I am going to be talking about creating consistency in your income and your pay; the money that goes into your personal bank account. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about taking every bump out of your business because bumps will happen! This is about creating predictability in your personal financial future and helping you save appropriately so that you can manage the unpredictability that will inevitably come. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.