Everyone around you has it all. Nice cars, nice house, goes on vacation, and seems to never struggle. Meanwhile, you’re over here just hoping and praying there’s enough money in the checking account to purchase groceries that week.

The debts are piling up and you’re finding yourself in this weird depressing state that you never thought you’d be in. You went to school, made great grades, and even managed to get a decent job after college, but now those student loans aren’t looking like they were the smartest decision.

You keep trying to hold onto your faith that God will provide but everywhere you look someone else is doing better.

Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. Not only have I been there, but many of those folks that you think have it all figured out have been there at some point. If this you, struggling to make your income(s) work where you’re no longer struggling financially, allow me to encourage you.

Getting ahead financially isn’t easy. If you think it looks easy, think again. In fact, if you aren’t willing to work your tail off to get ahead financially, just go ahead and hit the big ol’X in the corner of this page. There’s no magic pill that will fix this mess and I know you know that, but if you’ve been trying to hold onto faith that God is just going to fix everything overnight, you’re clearly not listening to His voice. Notice I said, “listening” not “hearing His voice” because chances are, He’s telling you to do something that you don’t want to do so you’re choosing to not listen.

I know harsh, but how many times has that been true? We want something so badly and we pray with all the fervor of a Saint but when it comes down to it and we hear God’s voice telling us to take a leap of faith and do something that is super hard and we just don’t want to do it.

I compare this to in the Old Testament the story of the Pharaoh and the plague with the frogs (gross…totally gross). The Pharaoh actually tells Moses to wait until “Tomorrow” to make these disgusting frogs disappear. (Exodus 8.10) Misery can be comfortable. Habits, no matter how good or bad they may be become comfortable. The Pharaoh had grown used to the frogs being around him and he was going to have to get uncomfortable and make a promise that he didn’t want to make to Moses in order to be free of his misery.

And that my friends is what you’ll have to do. You’ll have to get uncomfortable in order to make your money work for you. You’ll have to take a really hard look at your finances and make difficult sacrifices. Husbands may have to give up the sports package in favor of ditching cable TV and wives may have to give up the $120 salon visit. Kids may have to give up one of their extracurricular activities.

It’s not going to be easy, but it’s 1,000% doable. God gives us tools to glorify Him with and money is just one of those tools. And in my opinion, it gets easier to manage money when we stop seeing it as ours and as someone else’s.

Okay, now I know you’re wanting some practical real life tips for making your budget work so here you go:

Create a Budget

If you haven’t already created a budget, do it now. Budgets are not bad – would you want to work for a company that didn’t have a budget? Probably not, because you’d have no idea if that company could pay you or not because they have no idea how much money they have or don’t have. You can grab my free workbook here to figure out how to build a budget if you’ve never created one.

If you have irregular income, this post explains how to budget for it here. 

When it comes to budgeting, think simple and write it down. Take you income and then minus your expenses and work to get the difference down to zero. Getting the difference down to zero means that you’ll be putting all your money somewhere whether it’s savings, giving, debt killing, or your retirement account. 

Take some time today to sit down with your bank statements and write out a budget. Don’t worry about it being perfect, because it won’t be. You just need to work to get your money written down on paper with a plan. 

Start Saving

If you don’t already have a savings plan in place you need to get one in place now. If your budget is so tight and there’s very little room for savings, just try to save $5 every paycheck. It’s not much but it’s a great habit to get into.

There’s also a free savings service that I love called Digit. Now, I don’t recommend Digit for building up an emergency fund because it’s way too easy to just transfer money from the Digit savings account into your checking account, but it’s a great savings tool for short term saving – like for a vacation or a large purchase. You can check out Digit here.

Tithe

Yes you should tithe, but I’ll be honest, I have a completely different outlook on the tithe debate than most folks do. I believe you should pray and ask God how much He wants you to give. You see my husband wasn’t raised in a Christian home so tithing is something that he has struggled with for so long to understand. When we were deep in debt and working our way out, I kept trying to keep “tithe” as a line item in our budget but my husband was completely against it because he said that we shouldn’t be tithing while in debt.

Of course, I wasn’t happy about it. I kept making my case and he kept saying no. Our Priest asked me “have you asked God what He wants?” At the moment, I prayed like a crazy lady asking God what He wanted us to do about the tithing thing. His answer was simple, “honor your husband”. My husband didn’t want to tithe while in debt so I chose to honor him and we didn’t tithe.

Now that we are no longer in debt we tithe and truth be told, we got out of debt a whole lot faster than I thought we would and I have no doubts it’s because I was obedient to what God commanded of me. So, ask God what He wants you do about tithing. I don’t have the answers for what you should do and how much you should tithe, He does.

Kill Debt

The only debt we have left is our mortgage (you can follow our progress here in my monthly goal update posts) and I honestly NEVER thought we’d be here. I never thought we’d be at a point where we no longer rely on credit cards to get us through emergencies (in fact, we don’t even have a credit card to use if we wanted to), but here we are.

Student loans are gone, credit cards are gone, my fancy fully-loaded Tahoe that I loved, G-O-N-E. All gone and that only happened because we firmly believed in killing off debt and staying out of debt.

Look at your budget and figure out what expenses you can cut – look at the ones that don’t provide a necessity, like a super high cell phone bill. You could switch to a cheaper company like Republic Wireless (who I personally use) or change your phone plan with your current provider. Make a list of all the expenses that you could eliminate from your budget or reduce and get started adding more debt-killing power to your budget.

Generate more income

My favorite way to earn extra money is with Swagbucks but I know many people get frustrated with it because it’s not a super quick, get rich thing. But for me, it’s super easy and if I can spend a crazy amount of time every day on social media, I can spend 15 minutes doing some boring survey or watching some silly video in favor of earning a few extra SBs from Swagbucks. SBs translate into points earned towards gift cards like Amazon or to cash (paid via PayPal).

Also I like to get creative with eBates which is a cashback site that you can earn cashback on your online purchases. What I do, is say there’s something at Walmart that I need to get, like a new trashcan because our dog decided to make it a chew toy, and I’m already planning to go to Walmart to pick up some groceries.

I log into eBates, click on Walmart, which will take me to Walmart’s online site, I’ll find the trashcan I want, purchase it and select “in-store pickup”. Head to Walmart to get my groceries, then pick up my trashcan. So, even though I technically didn’t shop online, I still earned my cashback on my trashcan. Then once I’ve earned enough cashback to cash out, I would just apply it to my debt snowball or to our emergency fund.

I hope that these things will get you started on the road to taking control of your money. And if you have any advice for someone in a rough place financially, please share below!

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