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?<\/p>\n
As we know all too well, Ireland has been in a cost-of-living crisis for some time now, so you\u2019ve likely felt the pinch somewhere along the way.<\/p>\n
Christmas isn\u2019t too far away, so you might need a plan of attack for that, or perhaps you\u2019re looking to set a longer-term monetary goal.<\/p>\n
This week on the Money Talks podcast, budgeting expert Caz Mooney shares her expertise on how to take control of your finances.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cMy husband was out of work for about 11 months and that time was probably the hardest for us financially, ever,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt all began on the plane home when my husband turned to me and he said, \u2018Do you know how much we spent on this trip?\u2019 And I didn\u2019t. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Desperate times called for drastic measures, and so Ms Mooney devised a \u201clow-spend year\u201d for the entire family.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe put our heads together and started thinking about what we wanted from life,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019d been renting [for] our entire relationship and the rental market, as it still is, it\u2019s very hard to get a property. The prices are crazy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was now or never \u2013 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, \u2018Look, we\u2019re going to do a low-spend year \u2013 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\u2019t need in order to save as much as we can, and hopefully buy our own home.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It worked. In time, the debt was cleared. By October, they\u2019d moved into their own home.<\/p>\n
Ms Mooney never planned on making this kind of thing her career, but today she boasts a huge online following under the handle @irishbudgeting \u2013 over 263,000 on Instagram, over 80,000 on TikTok, and counting. In 2023, she published her first book \u2013 Caz Mooney\u2019s Budgeting Planner.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would regard myself as a frugal person, but not a tight person. And I really dislike tight people,\u201d she told Katie Byrne on the Money Talks podcast. \u201cTo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The content of this podcast is for information purposes and does not constitute investment advice or recommendation of any investment product.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Are you good at it? Do you struggle with it? Is it a conversation you do your best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[79,18,19,17,39813,39812,234,235],"class_list":{"0":"post-54812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-katie-byrne","13":"tag-money-talks-podcast","14":"tag-personal-finance","15":"tag-personalfinance"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}