Episode 42 - Loud Budgeting!

Loud Budgeting is a new trend on social media. What is it? Are there any benefits to it? Let's talk about it...

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Paul, Welcome to Catholic money talk, where we talk about all things money and finance, and we try to do it through a lens of being Catholic, where our ultimate goal is to one day be in Heaven with the Lord. I am your host. Paul Scarfone, thank you for being here today. Welcome to Catholic money talk. Today, I want to talk about something I've seen on social media. It's a new trend for 2024 it's called loud budgeting. But before we talk about that, let's start with a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day, we ask You for all the grace and wisdom that we need to face the challenges of the circumstances that we find ourselves in. We know that you love us and that you have a great plan for us, allow us to yield to your Holy Spirit. We ask this all in Jesus' name. Amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen, so loud budgeting. I just saw this the other day. It was actually in a email I received that was talking about current financial topics, and people were looking for more information on this new 2024 trend called loud budgeting. And so I googled it a little bit, and I found that there's this young fellow who had posted, I don't know if it was on Tiktok or Instagram, but some social media platform where he said, It's the new trend. Let's do this. Let's show everybody out there on social media how you can save money, set boundaries, put your goals out there and just be loud about it. So it is, looks like it's more of a movement around some of the younger folks on social media. But I want to talk about it for a minute, because I there's something interesting about it to me. So let's just talk about personal finance for a second. You know, one of the reasons I started this podcast is so that we can really think like, how does our faith, how does our lens of faith, of being a Catholic, impact the financial decisions we make in the world? There's a strong push and encouragement, that faith and finances are in two separate things, right? My faith is is very private. It's when I'm home in prayer, or when it's when I'm at church, and it's all just between me and God, right? That's that's an idea, and finances can feel the same way, right? My my finances are just in its own little silo. They're personal. I don't discuss them with anybody, maybe not even my spouse, because they're very personal to me. And so we kind of want to break through that, because, you know, as Catholics, as Christians, know the truth, the truth will set you free right? Live in the light of the Holy Spirit. And how do we do that? We shine a light into all those areas of our life that we want to keep private, right? Maybe it's because we're scared, we're hurt, we're wounded. But when the Lord comes in, when his grace and mercy come in, it's like shining a light and everywhere and there's there's something I can say from my own experience, to live in the light, to have people that know me, that know I, could say my deepest, darkest secrets, like once I am fully known and seen right. The Lord does that. But when we can do it and help each other as brothers and sisters, we feel much more accepted, and we could feel the grace that the Lord has for us when we live in the light, when we share about every part of our life. And so this idea of loud budgeting. So what the idea is basically, you go on social media, and I guess to all of your followers or friends or whatever platform you're on, you would say, Hey, I am only going to spend $11 today. And you kind of throw that goal out there, and you can update people as you go along, but people can see it and encourage you and like what you're saying and say, you know, maybe they support it and say, hey, I'll only spend $11 today too, right? It's like setting, setting a bar of some kind for your friends or for yourself and other people see it and know it. And that can be helpful. Or you could set boundaries. And you know, if a friend or you see someone post something that says, hey, party at my house tonight, or we're all going to the beach this weekend. We're going to rent a Airbnb. You could say I am not going, right? You broadcast it so everyone can see it. I am not going because I am trying to save up to purchase a new vehicle or to fix my car. Are right? Something, you just state it out there, and everyone knows it's loud, right? Loud budgeting, it's out loud. We're setting boundaries, we're setting goals, we're telling people what we're doing and what's a priority to us, right? That's great, right? Some people could look at that and be like, Okay, I'm more private than that. I don't want the whole world to know. So why are these people who are saying it, saying it? Are they really trying to let the whole world know? Is that the benefit, right? Everyone knowing their business? No, I think the benefit to it is accountability, right? And so When, when, when we can state what our goals are, and we can articulate it. We say them out loud, we write them down like that's helpful. You need goals. If you don't have a goal, I've talked about this before. If you don't have goals in life, in any realm of life, right? It could be career, it could be relationship, it could be money, it could be fitness, whatever. If you don't actually have goals, it's kind of like you got in the car and started driving and you didn't put in a destination, right? Like, where are you gonna end up? Who knows. And you might run out of gas, you might get stuck in traffic, like, who knows, but you're not setting yourself up for a very peaceful time, right? If you don't even know where you're going. So having a goal is important, but the next thing that many of us need, and it's really crucial if we want to achieve success in so many areas of our life, and that is accountability. And the way we get accountability is we share our goals or our desired behaviors with other people. I've done different diets in my time, right? And if I'm dieting, and I tell my co worker, right, I've done this before, I tell my co worker, hey, I'm on a diet. And if we go in the lunchroom, we see some donuts out. If we go out to lunch, and you know, I'm not going for the salad, I'm going for fried chicken or something. And if I told my co worker, hey, I'm on a diet, my co workers can look at me and be like, Dude, I thought you said you were on a diet, right? So that that's a little bit of accountability there, which can be helpful, right? If we don't have that, we can kind of cheat ourselves, right? If we don't know how to hold ourselves accountable, and it's so much easier to have someone else help hold us accountable. I have had a personal trainer for almost three years now. Rarely does he tell me something in these recent months that I don't know, right? Maybe he'll correct my form on something, but there's not much he tells me that's new to me, or that's like earth shattering as far as fitness and my goals, and you know what exercises to do, and why we're doing this exercise, and that other one, what he does constantly provide that's always new and fresh is accountability, and he has to, right? I'm paying him, so he is very committed to providing accountability to me, right? Did you do your workout? You know? I think you can, you know, increase your reps, or, I think you can increase the weight you're doing, right? There's, there's a way that that accountability can help push and increase my success or my performance. So accountability is important. But one of the things that I fear about this loud budgeting and it being a trend is just like many other diets, and we've seen them all. I mean, 20 years ago, my wife and I first got married, after a first year of marriage, we went on South Beach diet, and that was, that was great. And then about, you know, we went on a cruise, which kind of took us off our diet. We never went back to it, right? There was another point in my life where I did that P 90x workout thing. I bought the DVDs and did that for, probably not the 90 days, probably 60 days at home, until my schedule got greatly interrupt and stop doing it, right? We've done keto and low carb at times, right? And a lot of these trends and fads, they're no good to us because we just we use them for a set amount of time, and we don't actually make the lifestyle change and so loud budgeting. What I would encourage people and challenge people to do is if you find that you're like liking this trend, and you think it's actually helping you in the moment to think and reflect and say, what are the elements of this trend that I find encouraging or that I find helpful to me, and then How do I implement those elements in the long term, like, how can I sustain that? Right? So the obvious ones to me, just from looking at this, is this idea of stating our goals out loud so other people can see it. It makes us more accountable, because we want to be people of our word, and it gives other people, in a one sense, permission. To hold us accountable, or at least encourage us in those things, you know, the the actions or activities that we're participating in, right, that we're moving towards, hey, I stated this goal, and so I'm doing this for this goal, and everyone can see it, and they can encourage you, or say, Hey, I thought you said you were doing that other thing, right? So that's, that's, I think, some good value that's going to come out of this loud budgeting. So how do these people, how do they increase their opportunity for success by making this more sustainable? So, you know, one of the things that quickly comes to mind is, again, I mentioned the accountability, but with accountability, right? The difference between my personal trainer talking to me regularly and holding me accountable my you know, daily exercise and workouts. How is that different from the my buddy at work, right? Who's saying, Hey, dude, I thought you said you were on a diet, right? Don't eat the donut. The difference is commitment. And so we want to have people that are committed to us and helping our success. You know, the guy at work that's kind of free help, right? You kind of get what you pay for. We've all heard that phrase, you get what you pay for. And I'm not saying you have to hire like a professional accountability partner, but many times, and I think of like if we're in a faith based small group, or if we're in some type of maybe 12 step program, or something like the commitment that people have to that group. It's not, it's not financially based. It's really based on, I know as much as I put into this relationship, like I can get more out right? The more value I put in, the more value I'm going to get out of it. And that goes for all the members in the group. And so something like this, like creating a small group or some type of accountability with friends or mentors of some type with our finances, is key. It's super helpful in our faith journey, right in our spiritual journey, when we get a spiritual director, right, someone who's walking along with us on our spiritual journey, who encourages us and can push us and challenge us in new areas of faith and formation like that's so helpful to have. If we're in a church based small group or some other faith community, small group where we share our life and our challenges, right? That's something that benefits us. The same can be said for our finances. I think that's what these people on social media are really trying to get, right. They're trying to find like a community or a group of people that can help push and encourage them. And they're doing it by stating it out loud, right? Which is very counter cultural to our the way we do things, where personal finance is called Personal Finance, because it's personal, right? And we don't share it, we don't talk about it. And sometimes, when we just get over that comfort level or overcome that challenge, we realize like there's no none of us, of our financial situations are any great shakes, like they're really not. None of us are Elon Musk or Bill Gates or, you know, there's only a few of those people in the world, and we might be sitting here thinking that everyone else's, you know, financial situation is better than ours. I don't want to share mine, because everyone will know that I'm a train wreck. Or maybe we think, Oh, I'm so much better than everybody else, like, I don't need everyone else knowing my business, because I'm super awesome. You're probably not, and you probably have some friends that could, you know, call you on and level you up a bit. So how do we find this accountability, this level of commitment? Well, first, just start where you are. If you're married, your spouse, that is your accountability partner, and you need to be working together on the finances, right? And I would also say don't go blast something on social media without tech checking with your spouse, right? There should be some level of trust and confidentiality in certain things. We all view finances differently. So if you're in a marriage, don't be quick to share your finances with someone else before you check with your spouse, right so the two of you can have great accountability and commitment right there if you want to bring another voice into it, whether it be you know, a friend, some type of mentor, a financial coach, like whoever it might be. You want to make sure the two of you are in agreement. Hey, we can share this information, but right there, just within your marriage, you have all you need, I promise you, to call each other on and push each. Other forward. You might not have all the information you need, so you might need to seek wisdom, read a book, listen to a podcast, find a good YouTube channel that's providing sound financial information. But you might need to learn. You might need to level up your own knowledge, but the accountability piece just between you two as a spouse, you got to learn to work together and push each other like that's how you're getting to heaven, right? This person, your vocation in marriage, you're trying to get each other to heaven. And so you need to do that with the finances too. You need to work together and hold each other accountable. If you're single, then you you know, having someone else, and I talk about this fairly often, finding someone that you can share your life with in your finances, really, everything would be great, but particularly your finances, and someone who loves you enough to tell you when you're kind of going off the trail, right? So you don't want someone who's just, yeah, you're doing great, like, just this, that, that yes man, that's always just gonna be super positive. You want someone's gonna blow the whistle on you and call you out when you're not being true to what you not being true to what you said you were going to do, right? And that's one of the things. Like on social media, you might not get just saying it out loud. You might not have a deep enough relationship with those people that you're going to get someone that'll call you out. There's some people that like to call out people that they think are being hypocrites, like that's a hobby of theirs. There's some people like that, but you want someone who really loves you and actually called you out because they want the best for you, and they want to help you stay accountable to those things that you've set as your goals that you've perfectly discerned. Right? So this, this whole thing of loud budgeting, can it be great? I think it can be helpful. I think get people out of their comfort zone a little bit, but I don't think that's where you're going to find long term success, right? It? I think it is what we see. It is just this, this hot new trend, right? This new idea that's just out there that some people are pioneering. But I think we look at, reflect on it. It's just a great reminder to us that we want to share our hopes and dreams and goals with other people. We want to share the behaviors we think we should be implementing and engaged in, and we want people in great love and care for us, to hold us accountable. And so I think that this loud budgeting. I think that's what it is. I think it's it's a cry of help for people that want people in their lives, knowing them, knowing what's important to them, and helping holding them accountable. Because when when someone holds us accountable and helps push us towards our goals, we feel loved, like we really feel loved. We want those people in our lives. It's kind of phrases like you say, Wow, you make me be a better person, right? You heard that's probably like a movie quote. You make me be a better version of me. You make me be better. We want those people in our lives. Why? Because they love us enough to blow the whistle on us, to call us out and to call us on and if we get the right people, the people that have that same love of the Lord that we want in our hearts, people that understand our desire like all we want to do is get to heaven, and we want to use our money, our time, our gifts and talents to try to bring others to the Lord, but to get us to heaven like that's what we're trying to do, right? The Lord, the Lord did all the heavy work, right? He died for our sins, but He wants us to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world, so that we can be happy with him forever in the next so how do we do that well? And how do we surround ourselves with people that want us to do that well, and that want to encourage us to do that well. So that's my little take on this new 2024, trend of loud budgeting. So if you hadn't heard about it, now you heard about it. If you want to google it and learn more about it, feel free to but again, I would challenge you, don't get sucked into a trend. Think of what is, what is their value in here, if anything, what is the value in this? And if it, if it's valuable and I can grab on to it, how do I incorporate it that into my way of life, right? So that I can benefit from this? And it's not just a flash in the pan, right? It's not just a brief blip on the radar, just a moment. But how do I actually capture what's good and true and and allow that to sustain for the long term and help me to achieve my goals? So that's all I have for you today. I hope this was helpful. Thank you for joining me. God bless. Thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe on your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. Foreign. You.