Loud Budgeting

Loud budgeting is a way to be more vocal and transparent about your budgeting and finances, especially with your friends and family. While you may not share all of the details about your budgeting and numbers, loud budgeting allows you to share your goals, values and priorities with those you most often are doing life with—since it may affect what activities you are participate in with them.

When sharing loud budgeting conversations with those around you, it’s not always about whether you have enough money to do something, but rather if that’s how you want to spend your money.

Loud budgeting allows you to share your money values and priorities with your friends and family without making excuses about why you don’t want to spend money on something. Setting your financial goals on your future dreams and sharing those with loved ones will help them respect the boundaries you put in place when you say no. You may also get some respect you didn’t expect and a few fans who want to also consider loud budgeting for themselves!

Loud budgeting can provide financial transparency with those who may want you to spend money when you don’t want to. Imagine that every Friday, you and your co-workers go out for happy hour that includes drinks and tapas. In a couple of hours, you easily rack up a bill of $50-$75. Multiply that by 4 weeks and you have $200-$300 per month spent on Friday happy hour. If that is part of your values of where you want to spend that amount of money—GREAT! If not, consider being transparent with your friends and practice loud budgeting! You may consider participating only once a month OR if everyone is on board, how about rotating who’s hosting each Friday happy hour at their place. You may be able to spend $50-$75, or maybe splurge at $100 and host once a month. You’ve just created an opportunity to do something else with the money that you didn’t spend the other weeks.

Some people share their money goals or limits in a more public setting, such as on social media or with their family. For example, it may be a tradition is your family to buy everyone their own Christmas presents and y’all have been doing it like that for years. Well, maybe next year, you want to cut back on the Christmas spending and you announce to the family that you’d prefer to draw names and everyone be obligated to buy only one gift for one other family member. How will that go over? For some families, it’ll provide relief because maybe they couldn’t actually afford gifts for everyone and announcing the changes out loud will be welcomed. For other families, gifting may be a priority or they don’t want anyone to know whether they can afford them, so you may get some pushback.

My husband and I are often loud budgeters. Most of our family and friends know that we value being debt free. Buying our house for cash was a priority. Sure, we could ‘afford,’ by other people’s standards, a bigger or ‘better’ house and taken out a mortgage. That’s not what we wanted. So, we decided to purchase a home in CA$H for less and will enjoy personalizing it when we move in. We didn’t do without while saving CA$H for our house, but we did adjust what we do often in order to keep our eyes on that goal. For example, more than 50% of Americans eat out 3 or more times per week. We eat out once a week, rarely twice and sometimes not at all. Due to changes in our perspective just in this area, we’ve become pretty good at cooking, enjoy spending time in the kitchen, re-allocated ‘eating out’ money to paying CA$H for a house and eat a little healthier than if we were eating out more. This isn’t the only lifestyle change we made to accomplish our goal. We make decisions often and share what we are doing (especially how to get a discount) with others through loud budgeting. Sometimes we get a side-glance, but oftentimes others start to ask questions or adopt some of our habits.