Appointment book for finances

Let's begin with the topic to topic today is going to be the appointment book for your finances. You're like,

what are you talking about? I don't have an appointment book for my finances. I can barely hold together an appointment book for my grooming salon. You can't run whether you own a grooming salon, you're a pet sitter and you have a schedule, you're a dog trainer. Or even if you're a veterinarian, you can't run your day willy-nilly. Letting people come and go as they please.

It doesn't work, right? And for those of you guys that are doing that, I would love for you to comment below and say, oh no, I just let people show up whenever they want, pick up whenever they want. They can have whatever services they want. Even when I own my grooming salon, I stopped allowing walk-in nail clips because people would show up whenever they wanted and I would have a dog on the table and they would show up,

and then I'd have to put the dog down or back in a crate, go over, check them in. Did they have their rabies? Did they not have their rabies? And it just created a whole mess. So I said, okay, you're gonna go come between this time of the day, or you can make a same day appointment where you can call up and I can schedule in your nail clip.

So what does that have to do with my finances? Let's have a conversation about that, right? You're gonna get sick of me saying it. I know, I know. But the truth is, your budget is the appointment book for your finances, right? Because what a budget does. Now, when I say a budget, I really suggest you do a zero based budget,

and I can explain what a zero based budget is in a moment. But when you're doing a budget, what you are doing is you are deciding the slots of money and putting a dollar amount, same as you would have. Some of you guys have multiple groomers, you might do more than one pet in a slot, but for the most part, we put one pet in a slot,

you know, to come by. We may be grooming multiple pets at once, but you wouldn't just allow 10 people to show up right in the morning, right? It wouldn't work. So what do you do? So with your money, you wanna say, let's say groceries really easy. Let's say I'm going to agree that I'm going to spend $400 a month on groceries.

It's pretty safe to say. So you can do that one of two ways. You can either give yourself a hundred dollars a week. Now, some weeks, I should say some months are a little longer. That may or may not be advisable, but at least then you have a set amount of money to do it The same way that you can only do a set number of dogs a day.

For those of you guys that go over that set number of dogs or cats, they are grooming, pet sitting for dog training, you get really stressed out, right? It's not long and sustainable. So the same thing with our budget. Now, let's explain the zero based budget. A zero based budget pretty much means you're gonna take every dollar you make and it's gonna have a plan.

And this is so backwards because we're told like you want money left over at the end of your budget, right? You don't, because what happens with that leftover money? I mean, it just goes poof, right? What happens is the money at the end of your budget just goes to whatever it is that you want. And if you have an extra $500 a month,

you might be like, oh, sweet, now I can go buy those shears. Or, oh, sweet. Now I can go out to eat five more times this month. Instead of saying, okay, the extra $500 is gonna go into retirement, we're paying off debt, or whatever it is this in this moment that you're working on. So with your appointment book for your finances,

I want you to look at how much money do you make on average. Some of you guys have a volatile income, you might be commission-based, even if you're hourly. The hourly might not be steady. How are you paid? And if you're not really sure how much you get paid on average, go ahead and take the last six months and figure out your average monthly income.

So add up all your paychecks in each month and then divide it by however months you did. So if you did six months, you would take your paychecks per month, add them together, and do that for all six months, and then add up all those six months and then divide them by six. And you could get an average. It's also good to know what your highest was and what your lowest were.

In New England, nine times outta 10. November and December are the busiest times a year, because we have Thanksgiving and Christmas. However, in January and February, it's very, very cold here. And because it's cold and it's snowing, a lot of people will push out their appointments. So people that come in December, let's say right around Christmas time,

December 25th, obviously they may choose to go all the way to the end of February or even early March, and depending on the weather, because they might not drive in the snow, or they may have the unrealistic expectation that their pet doesn't need to be groomed because it's cold out and they need all that hair. So with that, you know, I know in December and in November that I need to be able to take that money and put it into the Hills and Valleys fund or a savings account,

or however I wanna do mine for January and February. If I have a traditional salon in New England now in Arizona or somewhere warm, they have a lot of people that come in the wintertime because obviously it's much warmer in the wintertime and in the summertime it's blistering hot. So a lot of people probably get their pets shaved right before the summer, or they go somewhere else for the summer,

so they might have less people. So with your appointment book for your finances, you really wanna say, how much money am I gonna spend on X, Y, and Z? So with us, and I know a lot of times if you are an employee and not a business owner, you're an employee, you need to reinvest with your personal funds into your grooming.

So you should have a a little category of how much are you gonna spend on upgrading your equipment? How much are you gonna spend on your education? How much are you going to spend going to trade shows and seminars and continuing education? Because when you're an employee, those are your expenses. Now, you might have a great employer who's willing to pay for some of those things.

However, if you're a business owner, those should be lines in your business budget because the business should pay for those things. But if you're a business owner, you're still have a much more volatile income. So there's a lot more things going on there. Anyway. So with this appointment book for your finances, you're going to make a plan, you're gonna make a structure,

and you're gonna stick to it. I'm gonna put down in the show notes, there's a great app called Every Dollar. It actually allows you to create zero based budget. It's free if you want the upgraded version. What it'll actually do is link to your bank account and go ahead and you can just swipe your expenses right into the categories. I like the feeling of putting them in.

I find that I am a lot more aware of how much I'm spending when I actually have to input. So when I go to the gas station and I input how much I spent in gas, it allows me to keep an eye on that because obviously if I go over on gas, did I make a lot of extra trips I didn't need to, you know,

what was I doing that was different that month? And I might have to plan ahead better where let's say if I'm taking a road trip and I'm driving a long distance, I should plan in the beginning of the month to spend that extra money, whether putting a category for road trip or making the gas a little bit bigger. And the same thing with going out to eat.

If I'm going on a road trip, I'm probably gonna be eating out more. So that category will probably have to be bigger. So with that said, I wanna challenge you guys to go ahead to either every dollar.com or consider going on the Savvy Groomer page and learning how to make a zero base budget. We definitely go through all of how to create a budget in a meaningful way.

And on my online course called Personal Finance on Unleash, I would love to see you guys there. What is a 12 week course teaching people how to do a budget if you're a groomer, but also pet professionals work on that as well. So I wanna thank you so much for being here with me. Feel free to go to my website, which is Savvy Groomer,

SS A V V Y groomer.com. So I would love to see you guys at my online course, which is Personal Finance, unleash my website, savvy groomer.com.