Budgeting with buckets

Ever logged into your online banking and thought to yourself, 'Wow, where does all of my money go?'. Because, same. And if that's the case, maybe you want to take a bit more control of your finances by building a budget that works for you.

We get it. Budgeting your money isn’t typically anyone's idea of a wild Friday night – but that doesn't mean it's not important (and lowkey interesting).

Let’s start with a few basics.

You hear about them everywhere. But not sure what having a budget really means? You’re not alone.

• A budget is simply a way to make a gameplan for how you want to spend and save your money.
• The most basic form of a budget only requires you to know two things: how much money you have coming in and how much has to go out - think rent, bills and any other scheduled payments.

From there you can go in a lot of different directions to build out your budget, but ultimately you’re just trying to get to know where your money goes and how to best organize it in a way that works for you. That way, when the group chat starts blowing up about weekend plans you know you can’t miss, you'll know exactly how much you’ve got to spend without overdoing it.

Or if things are feeling a bit tight to make the most of those weekend plans, you can adjust your budget, and prioritize your spending to save up for future can’t miss weekends.

If you aren't aware of how much you’re spending, there’s always a chance that you're spending too much on things you just don’t care about. Remember that disappearing money feeling?

Creating awareness of what you’re spending your money on by budgeting can help you prioritize your saving and spending. So you know you’re putting your hard-earned money towards what’s important to you. Keeping you well on your way to achieving those dreamy financial goals you want to accomplish.

Brightside buckets are like everyday bank accounts, but totally free. They can be opened, set up, and customized super quickly and easily. All within our app.

This is where it gets interesting. Buckets are designed to help you take control of your spending and saving without feeling overwhelmed. You can easily customize all your buckets. Name them something fun, like 'Morning grind' because coffee. Or ‘Pizza is life’ because it is. And you can open up to 10 separate buckets, which means you can use them to build your budget, totally unique to you.

You can have multiple buckets for all your savings goals, like a new whip or a v cool tattoo. You even have the option to hide your balance from your alter-spending-ego so that there is no temptation to withdraw from your future self before you get to your goal. And, to get you to your goal even quicker, buckets can connect to our savings features, like Round Ups and Save Automagically, which both make saving more money even easier.

On the flip side, if you want to rein in some of your spending habits, you can open a bucket for expenses that you tend to overspend on. For example, if Friday night pizza has become three nights a week pizza, take control with this clever bucket budgeting hack:

Load your ‘Pizza is life’ bucket with $100, and make sure it’s connected to your Brightside Spend Card. Use your spend card for all your pizza orders and once you've spent that $100, you know to put your pizza parties on snooze until you can top up that bucket again. It's a happy medium to allow you to have your cake pie and eat it, too.

Of course, life has a way of throwing us more than a few curve balls. That’s why you can easily rename buckets, get rid of one altogether, or create a new one whenever you want. Remember the best part? There are no fees to sign-up for Brightside or to use any of the features, including buckets. So give it a try and discover what a budget organized by buckets can do for you.