Lizzy and Lissa break down the hidden costs – financial and otherwise – of budgeting. They talk about why budgets often fail, how different methods work for different people, and the emotional baggage that comes with managing money. Budgeting can be a source of empowerment or anxiety, depending on how it’s approached. This episode explores how to find a balance that actually works for real life.
Lizzy and Lissa break down the hidden costs – financial and otherwise – of budgeting. They talk about why budgets often fail, how different methods work for different people, and the emotional baggage that comes with managing money. Budgeting can be a source of empowerment or anxiety, depending on how it’s approached. This episode explores how to find a balance that actually works for real life.
Main Topics
00:00 Introduction
01:25 Running The Numbers Segment
05:37 Challenges and Tools for Budgeting
10:10 Different Approaches to Budgeting
13:31 Loose Budgeting
20:25 Building Financial Confidence
23:12 The Costs of Budgeting
24:48 Emotional and Relationship Impacts
29:12 Alternative to Traditional Budgeting
32:36 20 Cents Segment
References for Statistics
https://www.debt.com/research/best-way-to-budget/
https://www.intuit.com/blog/innovative-thinking/beyond-the-budget/
MUSIC: (Instrumental music begins)
Lizzy: Budgeting. It's one of the most common pieces of financial advice, but also one of the most skipped. People either swear by it, struggle with it, or avoid it entirely. Some say it gives them control and peace of mind while others say it feels restrictive and overwhelming. Today we're talking about "Is budgeting worth it?"
Lissa: Let's talk about it.
MUSIC: (Instrumental music ends)
Lissa: Welcome to Net Net with Lizzy and Lisa, where we analyze hidden costs and empower you to make your own damn decisions in life. Each episode covers a different facet of life. And at the end of each episode, we each give our takes on whether we think something is net positive or net negative.
Lizzy: I'm Lizzy, a strategist and consultant with almost 20 years of experience in finance and investing.
Lissa: And I'm Lissa, a personal finance expert and a certified financial planner. We're best friends who talk about money.
Lizzy: And everything else.
Lissa: In today's episode, we are discussing budgeting. However, this episode is informational and educational in nature and should not be misconstrued as financial advice. We share our experiences to help educate, but you should consult a professional for guidance as needed.
Is budgeting worth it?
Lizzy: First up, running the numbers on budgeting.
Lissa: According to Debt.com, 90% of people say they budget. That number feels high to me, but it probably includes folks who don't actually write things down or track their spending closely.
Lizzy: Agreed. Yeah, agreed.
Lissa: Mental budgeting.
Lizzy: In that same survey, the percentage of people who say budgeting has helped them get or stay out of debt has grown from 73% in 2018 to 89% in 2024. That's a big jump.
Lissa: Yeah. Budgeting helps get out of debt. Well, when it comes to why people don't budget, 30% of women say it's because they don't earn enough. Meanwhile, 34% of men say that budgeting simply feels too time-consuming.
Lizzy: Yeah, I could see that.
Lissa: Yeah. Different reasons.
Lizzy: But interesting. And a 2025 Intuit survey found that 58% of 18 to 35 year olds are starting to see financial management as part of their overall wellness routine.
Lissa: Good.
Lizzy: I like that.
Lissa: I like that too. Even more interesting, 44% of them reported an improvement in their quality of life after embracing financial wellness.
Well, we know there's more to life than numbers and statistics, so let's talk about it. Is budgeting worth it?
Lizzy: I feel like this is one of those episodes where I'm going to come into the day personally in a certain space and walk out in a different one.
Lissa: Yeah. Because it seems obvious, especially coming from financial professionals, that we were just going to say yes, that it's worth it.
Lizzy: Right.
Lissa: That seems like the obvious answer.
Lizzy: For sure. So I'll share my experience. I have very rarely been a rigid budgeter, the way I think of in some people that I know, or maybe the way my mom used to. And we didn't have much where, "Okay, I make a budget. I only have a hundred dollars for this month. And then when I get to $95 spent, only $5 more." I don't think I've ever done that in my life. However, I have at various points in time used either my own manual tools or now several apps that helped me get a general sense of how much I am spending and how to manage and kind of shift around money.
And I do tend to have a general sense of how much my hard expenses are on a given month and how much my kind of fun money is.
Lissa: Yes.
Lizzy: But right now, I said that I probably will shift my mindset. Because I have been in a rut. I use this app which I know you are very familiar with. This is not a sponsor.
Lissa: It's not a sponsored video, but maybe it should be.
Lizzy: But this app called YNAB, You Need A Budget. And at the end of last year, I had gotten out of the habit of it. So sometime at the end of last year, I reset my budget.
And man, I haven't looked at that thing. One of the challenges for me, which is kind of a cost of it, is my day-to-day is fine. But when I have very unique financial situations happening, so for example, the end of last year I sold a house, so I had a lot of money coming in, but then different payments coming out and I also shifted a lot of investments. It just feels complicated and you're waiting for a lot of things to settle before you make all of the moves. And that was kind of when I got out of the rhythm. So now I've had budgeting and bookkeeping on my to-do list for months. I finally, last week, opened it up and while I was in a meeting I didn't want to be in, started categorizing. It's easy. It's not a hard thing, but it's the rhythm and the routine. So for me, that cost is the time, the mind space, and the habit, which is hard for me.
Lissa: Yeah. Well, so the app you're talking about, You Need A Budget, YNAB... Similarly, I use that. Liz taught me about it years ago now, and I struggled with it at first.
Lizzy: It's a learning curve.
Lissa: It's a learning curve, and then just knew that I really needed something like it. I liked the principle behind it. Giving every dollar a job. Flexible budgeting where I didn't feel overly restricted, but I could still reach my goals without getting to the nuances of how it works as a method. Finally got the hang of it and I used it for a long time and, I pay for the app, and then I became a YNAB certified coach. Actually, I did a program that they had. Interestingly similar to you, in the past six months or so, I've fallen off. This is largely due to the fact that Allan and I are operating a lot on leverage right now. Because we had our wedding. We had a bunch of weird one-off expenses in the last six months. And on top of that, I still don't have an income that supports technically our lifestyle because we are making a lot of big moves. We're selling the house. We're having a wedding. We have money in investments. We're not digging a hole for ourselves.
Lizzy: But you're in a non-traditional spot right now.
Lissa: We're in nontraditional spot. It's not the normal income that we have on a month-to-month basis, and it's not the normal expenses. So it did become too time-consuming. I have plans to get back to it once things settle, but for now we're kind of just operating our finances loosely.
Lizzy: I completely understand and relate to that. And that may be somewhat specific to that app, which is, it doesn't totally lend itself to someone who uses a credit card a lot. Especially if you're pre-funding and then paying off, it can be challenging. But even just a general system... My budget mindset for most of my life, once I got into a place where I could have that was know the, kind of have the muscle memory about how much I can spend. So I really probably know if I'm overspending, but I have positioned myself in a way where at the end of the day I almost always have some cushion. Or if I overspend this month, I'll probably be fine next month. I never have really dug myself into a hole. And to be fair, that's really worked for me just fine. That said, could I be saving or could I be cutting those expenses down? Without a doubt. Absolutely.
Lissa: Yeah. Well, I think we both speak from a privileged position where we are not at risk of going into debt or getting in over our heads when it comes to our finances, where we're going to not be able to make a rent payment or something like that. We're not at that position. Like when we were in our twenties when we were broke and just trying to make a living. So I think there's that, when you are in a good position and have a healthy relationship with money, it becomes a lot easier to actually not spend a lot of time on the details.
Lizzy: Agreed. Now that I'm thinking about it, I guess there was a period when I had to be more regimented. It didn't come to mind because I was using this app at the time. But when I first left my job, I didn't have an income at all and I went from high six-figures to nothing. And then even when I did begin to pay myself, it was maybe a thousand dollars a month. And even until a few months ago, I still paid myself, one would think for what I do, a very, very small salary, and so I had to cut back. So I guess in the sense of the act of budgeting my lifestyle, I definitely cut back. I definitely was more mindful about what I spent, but I still didn't have that checking an app every day or checking my balance every day. That for me creates more anxiety. And even within that tighter income, figuring out, "Okay, what's my new free space to play in so that I have the luxury of not having to check all the time?" That's more what worked for me personally.
Lissa: So I'm glad you mentioned that because what you just described I think oftentimes does not get counted as budgeting, right? There's this misconception that budgeting is about a spreadsheet, and you have a bucket for this, a bucket for that, and God forbid you go over that or spend more than you should.
Lizzy: For sure.
Lissa: Right? That's what at least, I see a lot of people associate with budgeting. That's why they hate to do it and they feel it's restrictive, when definition-wise, I think there's a more broad definition where you kind of have a plan for your money. Some people don't write it down. I think it should be written down, but that's my perspective as a personal finance expert that-
Lizzy: Yeah. It's really interesting definitionally, now kind of taking a step back, because when I think of "budgeting" as a verb, I actually have a friend who kind of exemplifies the technique or the approach that I think of. And I don't think she'd mind me sharing this, who also uses, You Need A Budget, YNAB. And her approach is, every time she spends something, she's going to track it. The moment she makes the purchase, she will take a picture of the receipt. Her husband's on board. They're very, very diligent and it is just built in their lifestyle. They do it as they go. So at any given moment, they know exactly where they stand and it is that kind of constant awareness.
And then similarly, if they want to make a purchase, they'll check how much they have left in that category and make a decision that way. That's, I think, the very more classic definition of whether you're doing it with a spreadsheet or not. But in reality, there are all of these shades of gray or different approaches where it is having a general plan. It's just the awareness of what you spend. I was talking to another friend the other night and saying, my first foray into this world was actually with a different tool called Mint, that does some similar things. And the first step was just learning how much I spend on what.
And it's very illuminating. One of the examples I've given is now, every year I'm able to give kind of a report on how much I spent that year. There are whole categories I just didn't account for. So gifts. I think about, "Okay, I have to have a budget for Christmas." But not recognizing there's so many people in my life who I buy a birthday gift, a Mother's Day gift, whatever it may be, and on average that's like $100 to $200 a month. And if you're not accounting for that... If you're aware of it, you can make the choice to do it or not, but you're going to constantly be surprised and behind if you don't account for it. And so there were a lot of things like that that I viewed as one-offs, and part of the flexible piece of my budget that by doing this for a while, I started to recognize, "Oh, this is actually inevitable. I am going to spend money on these things, so I should stop treating it like an exception."
Lissa: So I posted a video on YouTube, I don't know, a couple months now, and I talked about the concept of what I call loose budgeting. Sometimes it's referred to as no-budget budgeting. And there's different ways to do it, but the concept is basically that you're not doing the spreadsheets, you're not tracking every expense, but you kind of know that you have a bucket of money to spend.
And in order to make sure that you reach all your financial goals, saving for retirement, saving for the ability to leave your job, saving for a vacation, all those things... Everything's kind of automated. So you would use a technique like paying yourself first, for example, where anytime new money comes in, you're automating money to go towards that savings account and that savings account and wherever. And then the rest is what you live off of, and the rest is what you use to pay your rent, your groceries and everything. And so in a sense, you are kind of budgeting because you're making sure to budget money towards those longer-term goals.
Lizzy: Right.
Lissa: But you're not really budgeting in the sense that... You just know that you got a thousand, $2,000 in your bank account to get you by this month and you can spend it however you please. So some people call that a a budget.
Lizzy: I would, yeah.
Lissa: Or loose budgeting. Some people say that's no budget. Now, in that video I describe that loose budgeting is for a very specific type of person. So there's two types that I see happen a lot with clients. One is people who do that that shouldn't be doing that. Because limited income, limited resources, high expenses, high cost of living, and you just don't have that kind of leeway to be doing it like that, right? Because then you're going to end up in debt and not notice it. So there's those people and then there's the people who have gotten their finances in such a good place that they know what's there, what's not there, all their goals are accounted for. But in order to get from that first person to the second, I think you go through a period of very detailed budgeting. That might be six months of your life, five years of your life. But in order to get from that loosey-goosey, not really achieving my goals to, "Okay, I want to loosely budget and have tons of money and wealth," you have to go through that phase. That's my perspective.
Lizzy: Yeah, that's been my experience definitely. But I would want to add that it can be fluid. So I think I had been more of that second person and now maybe moving back to the first because of just lifestyle changes. And where I'm at right now, I feel like, okay, I'm not a hundred percent sure where I stand. I know I'm not in trouble, but I think... I just had a recent move, I have a new apartment, just things I have awareness of that I'm like, I probably overspent on some things, I probably have to move some money around, but I want to get back to that clean slate so that I know and I can feel more confident and give me that little extra bit of peace of mind and then kind of reset, essentially.
Lissa: Well, I agree 200%. I think I mentioned that nuance in the video, where then once you get to that point, the actual act of budgeting or being very detail-oriented with your inflows and outflows, then it becomes just this skill and tool that you have that you can turn on whenever you need to when life changes.
Lizzy: And sometimes things may creep. And I've experienced that, I don't know if you have, where you get that comfort of knowing, "Okay, I don't have to be so diligent about my purchases." And sometimes you have that mindset a few too many times in a certain period, and then you have to shift. It's kind of like an agility that you develop. But again, that's also specific to circumstances, and that doesn't necessarily mean you have to have a high income. It is more income-to-expense and how you're able to manage those things.
Lissa: From your own circles in your life. Have you observed different ways that people budget or don't budget? Anything that stands out?
Lizzy: My very first thought was that you are the first person in my life I ever talked about budgeting with.
Lissa: Interesting.
Lizzy: And it was not something that it was even a conversation growing up. I'm sure I witnessed things. I would see my mom balancing her checkbook and that kind of thing. But the first actual formal conversation, and it happened organically with us, but the person that comes to mind is my stepdad, who has no awareness of what things cost.
There's a clip from Arrested Development. "It's one banana. What could it cost? $7 or whatever." He's a business owner. At times, things have been great. At times, he's been waiting six months for hundreds of thousands of dollars to get paid and still having to operate his business. So there's been feast and famine. But he has a certain looseness with it that I witnessed and goes hand in hand with the fact that he doesn't really care about material things very much. So I think I kind of took some of that on. And it was very different from my prior household that, my mom and my sister will tell this story of my mom went to grocery shop for a family of seven with $21. And this was in the nineties, but that was not enough. So how am I going to make... I have $21 period. How am I going to make that work?
Lissa: Dang, that's crazy. It's so interesting the different journeys that people have, because I feel like some people are able to do so much with so little and still have a peace of mind about it or are super stressed about it.
Lizzy: Yeah.
Lissa: Then there's people who don't track anything, who don't really keep tabs and similarly can have a peace of mind about it or freak out about it. So what I'm trying to get is actually having a budget or budgeting method doesn't actually equate to any type of peace of mind. It really just depends.
Lizzy: I have maybe a counter-example to that for myself, that I was very financially risk-averse before I quit my job, and I was really afraid of that. But going through the experience of planning for it, I saved a lot of money and really tried to manage my income smartly for about a year and a half before I left my job. And I think that built the confidence that once I did leave, even though I was on a much lower income, I didn't feel stressed about it. And that really surprised me. So I do think I grew there through the process and the practice of building those skills.
Lissa: I think I'm in a similar boat. Because like I said, my income is not where it was before because in a building phase, and-
Lizzy: You're not tripping?
Lissa: But I'm not tripping at all. I'm just like, "All right, whatever. It'll get taken care of." Which is probably not what you want to hear from a financial planner or financial coach, but that's the reality. That's real life, is there are things you can do and learn about money and the mindset around it that can make you feel peace of mind and confident regardless of what your methods are and how you organize your money and stuff. What are you laughing at?
Lizzy: That's so funny because I am in the same spot. I'm like-
Lissa: "It's fine."
Lizzy: "I'll be fine." But sometimes I get worried, I'm like, "Oh, am I a little overconfident?" Or for example, if I overspend one month for the past however long, I've always been like, "Okay. Well, next month I'll have extra that'll cover it." But now sometimes I'm like, "What if I don't, though."
Lissa: Don't have extra?
Lizzy: Yeah. What if I don't though?
Lissa: Yeah.
Lizzy: But then I also know-
Lissa: You have places to pull from if you needed to.
Lizzy: I'll be fine.
Lissa: So that's kind of the privilege too, of building wealth.
Lizzy: It is.
Lissa: When you have money saved up or in investments for the long term, it gives you kind of that backup plan that allows you to be loose with your budget.
Lizzy: And a really important point, this is its own topic, but even if those things are not ideal. So if you have hard assets, if you have retirement, if there's things that technically you can't pull from, you'd have to pay a fee. You still have them.
Lissa: Yeah. Oh, I'll pull from them if I need to.
Lizzy: There's still a safety net. So that's its own episode, but I think that's a good, really important point for people that may feel like they're in dire straits looking just at a pure bank account. But actually could maybe have a little more peace of mind if it really got that serious.
Lissa: So let's cover some of the costs of budgeting. Obviously, we know the benefits. It can help you manage your money, it can help you get organized, it can help you stay on track. But the costs... Time, you mentioned that.
Lizzy: Time. Yeah, definitely time. And I think there's different approaches of whether that's like one minute many times. Or if that's, now when I do it, when I do my bookkeeping for my business, sometimes it takes hours and hours. And then that has a mental weight to it, too.
Lissa: Yeah.
Lizzy: I also think depending on your relationship with money, it can have an emotional toll that's good or bad. Seeing it could provide reassurance. Seeing it could make you feel more stressed out. And the frequency affects that as well. So for me, I don't want to be thinking about this every day because that's just going to make me feel more stressed, and that just is. But the awareness of how it affects you I think is important in developing or deciding on an approach that's realistic for you.
Lissa: Yeah. Oh, I think that's major. So the cost of time, because either you're doing it once a week for an hour, once a month for a few hours, or once a year might take you a day to sift through all your stuff. Or you do it on a day-to-day basis like the friend you mentioned.
Lizzy: Yeah.
Lissa: Either way it's going to take you time. So that's a given. You have to weigh that with the benefit you get out of it. Now, I think that budgeting in general, if you have a poor relationship with money, is going to lead to negative feelings. You're going to feel restricted, you're going to feel scarce, you're going to feel all those things. So there's two things that have to happen. One, you got to figure out a money management system that works for you, and two, you got to improve that relationship with money. Because making more in those situations doesn't actually change anything, right? You can make more, but if you don't really have that system in place or feel confident about your money, you're still going to feel scarce.
Lizzy: Yeah. It makes me think, and this is kind of like a motto, mindset that I live by of, if you have a cavity or something, ignoring it is not going to make you get any better. Just get in there, deal with it, and it's going to suck...
Lissa: Yeah, you don't like how it feels.
Lizzy: But it'll get better over time, versus turning into something much, much worse. That kind of "rip the bandaid off," I think, is if you can develop that skill in and of itself, is really valuable.
Lissa: So this is an interesting nuance, I guess, but there's kind of a... Tell me what kind of cost this is. If you budget and you have different tendencies and strategies than your partner...
Lizzy: It's tough.
Lissa: Right? It can wield some feelings of like, oh, one person's stingy or frugal or whatever, and the other's not, simply by having a budget. So I feel like even though that's not what I think budgets should be used for, I do see that happen with couples.
Lizzy: Yeah. I think we touched on this a little bit in our pre-nups episode, this kind of idea of the money mindset and navigating that with your partner. And going back to the definition of a budget, I think if you think of it as a system that works for you, you can build into that. Does that mean that one partner needs the freedom to spend, to buy something or spend on their hair or whatever? Or does this other person need a lot of rigid detail? And how can you negotiate those two things into a system that works for both?
Lissa: Yeah.
Lizzy: Maybe it's you pay for a certain amount of things and then you take your money and you split it and you each handle it your own way.
Lissa: Yeah. So yeah, I see that. It's a big role in relationships because even if you want to keep your own separate budgets, there still has to be a shared plan, or I guess I keep calling it "budget," but there has to be a plan for money.
Lizzy: Sure. I mean, again, it's happening whether you're doing it or not. So the natural tendencies, even if you're not at a point where you're considering your finances together, but who's paying when we go do this? What's the expectation? If we go on a trip, who pays? How are we navigating these things? It's really critical in relationships and can take a toll.
Lissa: I can't think of any other costs, like major costs, to budgeting time, energy, and then the potential negative emotional response if you have that kind of a relationship.
Lizzy: Which can also, if you blow your budget, then there's also that kind of shame element, or depending on your relationship, right?
Lissa: So the emotional... There's emotional costs and tolls with budgeting.
Lizzy: Certain apps have a financial cost. So the one we both used does, and there are many others. There's also a time element in finding a system that works for you. So not just the time in doing it. But you and I both have many iterations of Excel spreadsheet budgets. I still also keep a spreadsheet, but it's not for my ongoing transactions. It's more high-level and then my net worth and stuff. But depending on how your mind works, certain things are going to work for you and certain things aren't.
Lissa: Yeah. So I want to offer, before we get to 20 Cents, I want to offer an alternative to budgeting.
Lizzy: Okay.
Lissa: But again, this might just be a different form of budgeting.
Lizzy: Okay, sure.
Lissa: But something that I have my clients do, or I talk about this all the time on my YouTube channel, is in order for a budget or any kind of money plan, money system, money management system to work, you have to know your actual numbers. So I run an analysis, a cash flow audit on at the very least the last 30 days. But preferably you do it for the last 90 days or last year if you want to. And what you're doing is you're looking at actual data of what you actually spent and what you actually made in the past, not... I think some budgets don't work for people because they're guessing what's going to happen in the next month. Like, okay...
Lizzy: Or overly optimistic.
Lissa: Or overly optimistic. Like, "Okay, this next month I'm going to make this much and here's what I want to spend for each category." And then they forget about the gift category, right? Whereas if you look back, you're going to capture those things that you actually spend money on. And your last 90 days might not be like your next 90, but it's a better foundation than guessing altogether.
Lizzy: The little stuff adds up, like fees from financial institutions, parking. There are so many things that people would not-
Lissa: Yeah, parking incidentals-
Lizzy: Think, yeah, I had to get extra gas or just little things that are so easy to not account for. And if you're not accounting for them, your budget is blown.
Lissa: That's why you look at the past. You look at, "How much money did I make in this time period? How much did I spend? And what is that extra surplus?" And if you do that for enough months and get an average, it gives you an idea of, are you living within your means? Do you have power to make financial decisions like investing or saving? And that's one way to whether or not you take that information and do a budget or not budget at all. It guides you in what you can do financially.
Lizzy: Yeah. I mean, I wholeheartedly agree. And I will say, even though right now I'm not doing the day-to-day, I did do that exact process the end of last year, accounting for the life changes I was going to have. So I still have those kind of rough numbers in my head, and I think that gives me the freedom to navigate it that way.
Lissa: Yeah.
Lizzy: I recommend that as a first step for anyone. And one small note, I know now... I bank with Chase, and they will give you a, not very detailed, but a general categorization on a monthly basis of how you're spending. So even starting with that, and then you can dig into it and see like, "Oh, wait. What was that?" Or, "A thousand dollars on travel. What was this?"
Lissa: Most credit cards do that too.
Lizzy: Yeah.
Lissa: So that's another alternative to budgeting, is just keeping tabs of what's already happening.
Lizzy: Yeah. And so, that's a good starting point if you don't want to dive too much or put too much energy into it. Just glance at that. Take a look. Can't avoid it forever.
Lissa: I had to throw that out there just because, you know, budgeting's, as a personal finance expert, I'm big on it. It's not for everyone, but you'll hear what I think about it in 20 Cents.
Lizzy: All right.
Lissa: 20 Cents?
Lizzy: 20 Cents.
Lissa: 20 Cents is the segment of the show where both Lizzy and myself, Lissa, each get 60 seconds to give our 2 cents on today's topic, whether we are a net positive or net negative for budgeting. Where does 20 Cents come from?
Lizzy: You get the opinion of two dimes.
Lissa: Two dimes. Liz, you're up first. 60 seconds on the clock. For you right now in your life, is budgeting worth it?
Lizzy: Whew. I'm a little torn because of this reframing that we did. So I think I will go net positive, with the caveat that even just having this conversation gave me the validation that I don't need to be that person that does it every day, and that's okay. But I do have a general system and I do want to tighten it up a little bit, but even that is being responsible and still having a budget. And so I think this was really helpful for me, of navigating that in my own head. I think having awareness of what you spend in general and a plan for how you're going to allocate your money is important, even if it's not something that you even think about every day, or even every week.
Lissa: Yeah.
Lizzy: Yeah.
Lissa: Okay. Net positive.
Lizzy: Net positive.
Lissa: Nice.
Lizzy: All right. Lissa, what about you?
Lissa: So I'm going to say that this might not be traditional personal finance advice or tips. But I am highly supportive of the fact that I don't think you should be doing a detailed budget for the entirety of your life. I think that can just take up so much time out of your life and can create stress whether you have the money or not. So I really support the loose budgeting that I described, with the caveat that I think it's a skill that everyone should have in their toolkit. So I'm going net positive because even though I kind of loosely budget right now, I'm going to go back to being detailed as soon as I can. And I'm going to have phases in life where I'm tracking very closely and where I'm tracking loosely. But in order to actually budget those times that life happens and you do need to pay attention more closely, you have to have that skill.
Lizzy: Yeah. Completely agree.
Lissa: So I'm big on everyone should learn it. Everyone should try to find a method that works for them. For me, I still consider what I do budgeting, even though it's not your traditional sense of it right now. But I'm going to go back to it time and time again in life.
Lizzy: Yep. Love that. One thing that made me think of that I meant to point out earlier is... One of the opportunity costs, I guess, of not budgeting or being more loose with it is there are going to be things that you overspend on or things that slip through the cracks. And in my opinion, you have to be comfortable with that. Knowing that you could have saved more during that period, or you could have managed it more diligently and you didn't. And that's okay. And that's a choice. And so I think that's a good awareness. And for some people, they don't want that or they're in a phase where they're really trying to get every dollar's worth, and that's wonderful, too. So it's really just choosing what's right for you.
Lissa: Yep. Well, we are both net positive for budgeting, but this is what we think right now at this moment in time. No one can make that decision but you. What do you think? Is budgeting worth it?
Lizzy: Hit us up. Let us know what you think. DM us on Instagram at Net Net Podcast or email us at "Hi" at NetNetPodcast.com. And if you want to follow us individually, here's where you can find us.
Lissa: I'm at "Wealth for Women of Color" on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
And I'm at Live underscore Well underscore Lizzy on Instagram and TikTok.
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Lissa: All references, statistics and resources mentioned can be found in our show notes. This podcast is for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and should not be constituted as financial advice. Remember to always do your own research, consult a professional as needed, and feel empowered to make your own damn decisions.
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