In this episode, we explored budgeting with the GoodBudget app for effective financial management. The app’s features were highlighted, emphasizing simplicity and accuracy in recording transactions. We also shared a quick tip on using the iPhone Spotlight feature and showcased the Zoom ZUM2 microphone for high-quality audio recording.
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What do you think? When I say the word budget, do you jump up, down and say, oh, goody, yay, budget? Awesome? Probably not. Not unless you’re a financial nerd. And then maybe you just bring out your computer and take your spreadsheet and sit down and look all official and work on a budget. Well, I get excited when I use my good budget app, which is very accessible, right out of the box with no tweaking needed. About nine years ago, I really found myself needing to have a budget. A couple years earlier, I’d gotten a job that gave me a lot more income, and I was inclined to spend a bit more. I still like to spend, but it was just super necessary for me to have a budget. Now, when I was growing up, my parents were older. They were born. Well, see, my mom was born, actually, in 1930, and my dad was born before that, and so they went through the great depression, and so they were used to scrimping and shaving and budgeting and all that. And they even remember the envelope system. When I tell my clients that I teach about the envelope system, they have no earthly idea what I’m talking about. And you might not either. So let me just explain that people used to be paid in cash a long time ago, or they. They might readily go to the bank and cash their check, and they paid merchants and companies with cash. And so the envelope system was really easy. What they would do is they would write the name of a category of spending on the envelope, and they would just put that money in the envelope. And then when they, you know, went to the store to do their grocery shopping, they would pull money out of the groceries envelope. And if the envelope didn’t have much money in it, they just didn’t have much money in to spend that month. So, common envelopes are rent, utilities, groceries. These days, subscriptions are good friends subscriptions. And maybe there is entertainment if you have animals, transportation. Did I say that one? That’s a good one. Entertainment is a. Is a common one that people can overspend on. Also, you might have charitable and giving saving. That’s a good one, too. Or emergency fund. So those envelopes are common. And so if you’re a big Dave Ramsey fan, or you’ve heard of him, he’s big on the envelope system, and he has an app for that, which I find is pretty complex. It’s called every dollar. And, boy, it drills down. You put your credit cards in there and how much interest and your payments you’re expecting. I mean, it really, really drills down, and it’s rather complicated. And so I like to hit the happy medium and use the good budget app. So, good budget works on the envelope system, and it works on a zero based budget situation. So what you do is when you get the money that you’re being paid, whether it’s the beginning or the middle of the month, you’re going to record that transaction in the good budget app. And then before you can do anything else, it’s going to require you to designate every dollar of that paycheck to an envelope. So let’s say for round numbers, you’re going to be paid $3,000. So I’m going to maybe take 1000 of that for rent because I live in a low cost area, which actually, I don’t. I wish I only paid $1,000 a month for rent, but anyway, so I’m going to take $1,000 for rent. And so when I record that transaction that I pay to the company where I rent my townhouse from, I am going to specify that that money comes out of the rent envelope. See, I give a certain amount to giving. Maybe I pay my. My cell phone bill, which is also connected to Internet. And so that is going to come out of the utilities envelope. So, as I do that, each of these transactions are recorded such that when the money is taken out of the envelope, it also tells me how much money is left in the envelope. So before I go on too much more, let’s see if we can get to this good budget app, and I’ll give you a little bit of a tour.
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Charitable edit button.
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Okay, so as I touch the top of screen, there isn’t an edit button, but I think we’ll go to the bottom.
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First tab bar, selected envelopes. Tab 105.
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You hear I’m in the tab called envelopes. This is where all of my envelopes are listed and the amount that I budgeted for the envelope and the amount that’s left in there.
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So rent, 0.514,995.
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That’s actually how much I pay for rent. So it says that there is $0.50 in there. But then it. What was. Because I paid my rent, but what was budgeted was $1,495. And so that is an example. Here’s another one.
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Charitable, 80.00. 430.00.
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Okay, so the charitable, there’s $80 in the envelope. The first number is how much is in the envelope. The. The next number is how much I budgeted for the envelope. So there’s dollar 80 in there. What I budgeted for the whole month to give is $430. So that’s an example of how things are listed. Now, since this is the envelope screen, what I might like to explore is.
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Tab bar, selected envelope transactions. Tap two or five.
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Here’s the second tab. Transactions. So when I double tap on that, I am going to be able to go through my list of transactions date by date. So they’re listed with the latest ones on top and then moving backwards, and they’re going to say what envelope they came from, what the date was, and the amount, of course. Okay, the next tab.
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Accounts. Tab three to five.
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I only have one account. Some people keep track of more than one account in this app. There is an online version, and I don’t remember if you can actually connect it to your bank, but I do not actually connect it virtually to the bank reports.
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Tab 405.
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Now, the reports are kind of interesting. There is a visual report you can run, but there’s also an expenses versus income report that you can also run to see. Say that my rent is such and such. How much is that? A percentage of my total income. I can also see what percentage I’m spending in each area.
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More type five. Five.
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The more tab has to do with, say, your settings, your subscription information, your user account name, and you have the chance to log out or you can clear all the data. So let’s check out a couple other things here. I have edit button, the edit button. And I could edit the name of.
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An envelope or envelopes heading add transaction button.
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There’s the important add transaction button. So I’m going to do that, and I’m going to show you the different choices that we can make when we add a transaction. First I want to say though, that one thing I did was when I first started using this app, I put in an initial income amount of what was in my checking account. I made sure all the transactions had cleared, so what was in there was actually available to me. And so say that I had dollar 300 in my checking account, that I knew there were no other transactions that were going to come out. So the first item I entered into the good budget app was an income of $300. And I said it was from Chris’s checking account because it asks you where the income came from. And then I added my actual any income after that that I got and my transactions. So even though this is not technically tied to my checking account, it does accurately reflect my checking account balance because I absolutely religiously record all of my transactions. So this is the add transaction button cancel button. Okay, now we’re on the cancel button, which is always in the upper left corner. So we’ll move to the right.
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Add transaction heading.
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This is our heading.
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Save type expense button.
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Okay, so you notice this is a button and it’s saying the type is expense button. So if you double tap on this, you’re going to get some choices because you’re going to also enter income. So let’s see what our choices are selected expense. Okay, here are the other options.
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Add income.
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Okay, there’s the add income button. So when I get my paycheck each month, I double tap on that and I write the amount, who it’s from, and then I start putting the money in the envelopes. I can either put the budgeted amount that I’ve decided upon or a specific amount. But whatever the case is, after I tell it, which tell the good budget app where to put that specific amount in that particular envelope, I can hit a save button. And that saves that little piece of entering my income. So let’s say that I wanted to enter my 1495 rent. I would say that I’m going to add $1,495 to the rent envelope, and then I hit the save button, and that saves that particular little piece of my input into the good budget app. And then I continue to the next envelope down. And if I don’t want to add anything to the envelope, I don’t have to. But when I do add something to the envelope, I double tap the name of the envelope and then I, you know, tell it whether I want to add the budgeted amount that I’ve decided upon already or a specific amount. Okay, so I derailed. Now I’m back and back to the type of transactions. So we have income fill from available. Okay, so fill from available transfers. Heading transfers. Okay, so transfers.
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Envelope transfer.
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Okay, I can transfer from one envelope to the other. So borrow from Peter to pay Paul, I think is the expression. So let’s say that I have a little abundance of money in one envelope that I need for another one. I can make an envelope transfer account.
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Transfer.
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Okay, I don’t have another account, but if I did say it was a savings account, I would transfer that to the checking debt heading. There’s the debt heading.
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Debt payment.
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Okay, there’s the debt payment. I just have it under credit cards. So I don’t actually use this type of transaction.
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Interest fee or new charge.
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Okay, so interest, fee or new charge. That’s a good one because sometimes we do have to pay those and they are taken out separately. Okay, so those are the type of transactions. So if I were to go back.
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Up fill from available selected add selected expense.
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Okay, so there’s expense.
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Expense button. Peggy, who received payment button.
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Here’s the who received payment button. So when I. If I were to double tap that, I would be able to enter the information in. I bought spent $100 at Costco amount AMT text field. So I had to swipe twice to get to the text field. When I double tap on it, it comes up as like a phone number type keypad so that you can enter the numbers.
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Envelope button.
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There’s the envelope button. That’s where I decide what envelope that expenditure is coming out of.
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Account checking button.
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I’ve labeled my one and only account checking details heading, and here are the details that you can change or not. They’re not necessary, but the first one.
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Is 511 24 button.
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Okay, that’s the date today. If you’re catching up with transactions, which I recommend that you stay on top of it because that makes it easy and you don’t run into trouble. But if you are catching up with the last couple days of transactions, it is possible if you want to adjust the date and the calendar is very accessible.
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Schedule ellipsis never button.
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I don’t schedule transactions because I just want to put them in when they occur.
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Check text field.
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There’s the check number. Text field.
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Note text field.
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And there’s the note field. Sometimes I put the note in, say that I transfer money from my savings account and it’s counted as income. Then I might put income from savings, something like that.
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Expense credit. Expense button.
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Okay. And there’s really the end of the decisions that you make with an expense. I’m going to type expense cancel button. Okay.
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Edit button.
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Income is quite the same in that you’re going to say, of course, who paid you how much? And then you’re going to fill the envelopes. As I say, the envelope filling sounds a bit complicated, but basically the, the only two real decisions that you need to make generally are, do you want to just add the budgeted amount, say that, you know, $200 blow money, add that to the envelope, and then hit save? Or do you want to add a specific amount that you’ve decided so you want to increase or decrease that $200 blow money, then you’re going to type a specific amount and then save it. The only other really cool thing that I’ll mention in just this basic run through is that there’s a, when you’re adding money to your envelopes, or if you’re spending money from your envelopes, there’s a really cool feature called split to multiple. So, split to multiple involves the concept that maybe your credit card payment, let’s say, encompassed paying for transportation, something for your pets, and blow money. And if you know how much those three things are individually, you can split that expense between those three envelopes. So let’s say you paid $100 for something for the pets, $20 for transportation, and then maybe you had $50 for blow money. So you would be splitting that $170 payment to your credit card among three different envelopes so that you’re accurately reflecting what you’re spending when you make that credit card payment and which envelopes are being deducted, basically. So it sounds a little bit complicated, but actually, it’s an easy app. It’s completely accessible. It’s awesome. I did have some really great interaction with customer service on a couple of occasions. I do have a subscription only because, well, for two reasons, I wanted more than ten envelopes, and that requires, I believe it’s a $45 subscription each year, and I wanted to support the developers. I thought it was important to do that because this app needed no tweaking, no button labeling. It was just completely accessible right out of the box. The only time I thought it was broken, and I was very sad and frustrated, is when I discovered that screen recognition had been turned on. Now, occasionally, I think that gets triggered somehow. We don’t realize it, but I absolutely did not turn it on, and I was struggling with the app for a couple hours, writing down all the things that weren’t working. I let the tech support know at good budget dayspring technologies, and then I wrote them back and I say, wait, you know, if you have anyone else who ever runs into this, there’s nothing wrong with your app. I’m happy to say screen recognition was turned on. So sometimes that silly screen recognition causes way more problems than it actually solves. But I was so happy to know that my beloved good budget app, which I’ve used for the last nine years, was just fine and dandy. So, hopefully this run through has been helpful for you and maybe will encourage you to give this good budget app a try, even if you just want to play with the free version where you have ten envelopes and you. You just see if you like it. It’s totally a great app to experiment with, and if you have any young people in your life who have no earthly idea what a budget is, it’s also good to share it with them. Thanks so much to everyone for listening to the good budget app demo run through.
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I have a quick tip using spotlight on iPhone with voiceover so first, what is spotlight? Spotlight is how you search anything on your device or on the Internet all in one place. You can do a ton of stuff with it. You can do calendar events, you can do to dos, you can do all kinds of stuff. It’s limitless. You can even open apps from there or do Internet searches. The way you would access this from the home screen is you would do a three finger swipe down from the top. Then you’re going to see a search box show up at the top of your screen and there’s going to usually be some immediate icons or other little apps that will show up by default because those are things you use most often. Now, the more you use Spotlight, that might change. If you’re looking to access Spotlight faster, then check this out from the lock screen. You do a three finger swipe down and spotlight shows up right there. You don’t even have to click into your phone to go to the desktop or any of that. So that’s super fast, easy. If you’re somewhere and you need to look something up or find out some information, all you have to do is click the lock screen, do a three finger swipe down. Spotlight shows up right there with a search bar right at the top and everything. And you’re searching for whatever it is super fast. So give that a try and enjoy.
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Hey there, it’s Michael here and I’m giving you a brief demonstration of the zoom two USB condenser microphone. I found out quickly it’s a side address microphone, so this mic, it’s kind of short and stubby. It does come with a windscreen that you put on one end of it. The sides are of the microphone are flatter, so if you point those at you and the people you’re interviewing, then you can record this microphone and get pretty good quality out of it. But if you address it from the front, which is what I’m used to, doesn’t give you the best sound. It is a super cardioid pickup pattern microphone, which means that it does a good job at rejecting outside noise that shouldn’t be in the recording. You also get a pair of headphones in the package, a tripod stand, so if you just want to throw it on your desk, you can. And a heavy duty custom fit windscreen that you can put over the microphone to stop those plosives you might have. The microphone uses USB C for its connector and you’ll find in the box a USB Type A to USB C cable on the left hand side you’ll find a headphone jack. It’s 8th inch connector and on the right hand side you’ll find a volume knob to adjust the volume in your headphones. Plug and play with Windows eleven. Just plug it in. It showed up in Reaper for me and became an input device. I think I did have to unplug it once and plug it back in, but then once I did that I was able to use it. The microphone does show up in my screen reader sound card menu, so I can route my screen reader to the microphone and it’s not heard in the live environment or the recordings. This is the Zoom Zum two podcast mic bundle available@atguys.com.