Are you good at it? Do you struggle with it? Is it a conversation you do your best to avoid with friends, loved ones and colleagues?
As we know all too well, Ireland has been in a cost-of-living crisis for some time now, so you’ve likely felt the pinch somewhere along the way.
Christmas isn’t too far away, so you might need a plan of attack for that, or perhaps you’re looking to set a longer-term monetary goal.
This week on the Money Talks podcast, budgeting expert Caz Mooney shares her expertise on how to take control of your finances.
Mooney and her family have been forced to tighten their purse strings at various points over the years. There was a stage during the recession when both she and her husband were unemployed and unable to find work. “My husband was out of work for about 11 months and that time was probably the hardest for us financially, ever,” she said.
In 2018, Ms Mooney needed to make radical changes after a 10-day holiday to America resulted in a colossal credit card bill and a subsequent reality check.
“It all began on the plane home when my husband turned to me and he said, ‘Do you know how much we spent on this trip?’ And I didn’t. It was all put on the credit card. He had just looked at the bank statement and it was a shocking amount, just for one trip.”
Desperate times called for drastic measures, and so Ms Mooney devised a “low-spend year” for the entire family.
“We put our heads together and started thinking about what we wanted from life,” she said. “We’d been renting [for] our entire relationship and the rental market, as it still is, it’s very hard to get a property. The prices are crazy.
“It was now or never – we needed to think about looking into buying our own home. So, at the start of the new year, we sat down with our kids and said, ‘Look, we’re going to do a low-spend year – this is crazy, but for one year, from January 1 to December 31, we are going to spend as little as we can on things we don’t need in order to save as much as we can, and hopefully buy our own home.”
Ms Mooney notes that a positive attitude was key to this grand undertaking, that no matter how good or bad it went, everyone would commit to the plan for the full year and do their very best to change their habits and start to budget.
It worked. In time, the debt was cleared. By October, they’d moved into their own home.
Ms Mooney never planned on making this kind of thing her career, but today she boasts a huge online following under the handle @irishbudgeting – over 263,000 on Instagram, over 80,000 on TikTok, and counting. In 2023, she published her first book – Caz Mooney’s Budgeting Planner.
“I would regard myself as a frugal person, but not a tight person. And I really dislike tight people,” she told Katie Byrne on the Money Talks podcast. “To me, a frugal person is somebody who saves money in order to spend money. Whereas a tight person usually saves money at the expense of others.”
You can listen to the full chat with Caz Mooney, including her tips for how to tackle a low-spend year of your own, on the new episode of Money Talks wherever you get your podcasts.
The content of this podcast is for information purposes and does not constitute investment advice or recommendation of any investment product.