 Greetings. I'm Comet Rourke, and this is the Communist Manifesto for Personal Finance, the only program that teaches you how to seize your means of production. On today's episode, we're covering budgets, a concept so simple four-year-olds could understand it, so naturally, Congress doesn't. Now when we think of budgets, we tend to think that they're boring, and that's because they are. But we also think that they're complicated, which is simply not true. So on today's episode, we're going to form a budget that's as simple and easy to run as a nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. But before we can do that, let's look at how a budget works by using the most valuable currency of the Soviet Union, potatoes. Part one, theory. What is a budget? Greetings, Bolshevik Bunny. Greetings, Comet Rourke. What are you doing on this fine day in the workers' paradise? I'm harvesting potatoes. How many do you harvest? Ten a week. Wow, that's an above-average yield under Soviet agriculture. It sure is, comrade. I can't wait to eat them for dinner. Whoa, Bolshevik Bunny, you're not going to eat all those potatoes at once, are you? Why not? Don't you want to store some potatoes for winter? Oh, gee. I guess I forgot about the Russian winter. So did Napoleon and Hitler. Millions of people died. But seriously, Bolshevik Bunny, you need to save some potatoes for when you're not able to work anymore. How do I know how much I should save? It's easy if you use math. How will math help me? By using math. We can find out how many potatoes you need right now, how many you need to survive the winter, and how many you need to start putting away. Okay, well let's figure it out. Five military coups later. Well, Bolshevik Bunny, it looks like you need to be consuming five potatoes a week, but you also need to be putting away two potatoes a week. Oh boy, that means I get three extra potatoes. Yes, Bolshevik Bunny, three luxury potatoes, which is guaranteed under communism. Communism. Everyone gets three potatoes. Gee, comrade work, I guess with my harvest I can eat eight potatoes a week. You certainly can Bolshevik Bunny, or you can save those potatoes so you can have more in the winter. It's up to you how you manage your resources. And that comrade is what a budget is, a plan to manage your resources. Under capitalism, our main resource is our income. Now, what Bolshevik Bunny and I just demonstrated is something called the 50-30-20 budget, which says you should allocate 50% of your income for your necessities, 20% should go into savings, and 30% should go towards luxury. The budget advocated by a lot of financial experts and is complete and absolute bourgeois nonsense. One. Wages are stagnating while the cost of living increases. Of course, you already know this, otherwise why are you watching a show with the words communist and personal finance in the title? Two. I'm an Asian communist, and even I don't want to waste my time calculating 30% of my budget towards luxuries. If I want a luxury, I simply want to buy it and not worry how it fits into my budget. Three. Life happens. Emergencies come up. Sometimes you need money to bribe the secret police. The point is, you need a budget that's flexible for your needs. Now, as a communist, I enjoy inflexible structures with no possibility of change, but I understand not everyone might be on board with communism, which I don't understand. I mean, what has communism ever done wrong? The point is, if you're an American, you want a budget that's simple and easy to execute. A budget such as... The skim. The ultimate purpose of a budget is to save money for future needs, like, say, a guerrilla war in Southeast Asia. But how do we get there? Well, the best way to use... The skim. You skim off whatever percentage of your money you want to save. A good baseline is 10 to 20% of your income. Then you put that money into an emergency fund, a 401k, or an IRA. Then you spend the rest of your money on whatever you want to buy. And that's it. That's the skim budget. Just skim whatever you want to save off the top, spend the rest. Do you need to treat radiation burns from a minor nuclear reactor incident? Do that. Do you think all this talk of personal finance is ridiculous, because the world's going to end in 10 years? Skim 20% of your income off the top, and spend the rest on canned food and firearms. If this sounds simple, that's because it is. But, as we communists well know, whatever seems simple in theory is always a little bit trickier in praxis. So now, let's see how we implement the skim. Part two, praxis, putting the skim to work. The point of the skim budget is to make saving simple and hopefully easy. But I'm guessing for a lot of you, putting 10 to 20% of your income away right off the bat seems pretty impossible. Maybe you've tried putting money away towards retirement, but you have to keep dipping into your savings to pay the bills. Or maybe you're just treading water, don't know how to save, we're never taught how to save. And are too scared to look at your bank account. Believe me, I get it. I've been there. It sucks to be in debt. But you can get out of it. Now I have no reason to lie to you, so I'm not going to say it's easy, but it can be done. So relax, take a deep breath, and do these three things. Number one, start now. Now if you have absolutely nothing in your savings account, I want you to go to your bank or credit unions website and set up an automatic transfer of a dollar a day from your checking to your savings account. Do it right now. I'll wait right here. Five military coups later. Oh, you're back. Did you set up that automatic deposit? You did. Good. Now why did I make you do this? To demonstrate a very simple principle, automation is your friend. Now that's not always the case in this late-stage capitalist hell, but when you're worried about saving money, automation allows us to build up our savings without us having to worry about it every day. Of course, the trick to building up your savings is leaving it alone. And if you're one of those people who constantly has to dip into your savings to pay the bills, then the only option for you is to take a bite of a big old sandwich. Number two, know where your money's going. Now I believe personal finance should be simple, and if practical, easy. This next step is going to be simple, but it's not going to be easy. I want you for the next three months to keep track of every expense and purchase, every single one. So by now you're thinking, boy, this sounds tedious and dull, and that's because it is. Look, it's not easy. It's a big pain in the butt. But like wiping your butt after you defecate, it's something that you need to do. So now you're thinking, seriously, why are you making me do this? Well, it's not to torture you. Believe me, we wouldn't do this to torture you. It's so you can find out how much you spend per month. By keeping track of your finances for three months, we can use math to find the average. We're not doing this to be mean. We're doing this so you can find the mean. So now that I've explained it to you, you're finally thinking, no, seriously, do I have to do this? Well, I'll tell you what, if you can put away 20% of your income and pay your credit card bills in full without having to dip into your emergency fund or worse, your retirement, then you're probably in good financial shape. But if you can't do either of those things, then this is probably a good exercise for you and you need to suck it up. The first and best weapon you have against the capitalist pigs is knowing where your money is going. Because despite what neoliberal say, late state's capitalism does not want consumers. Late state's capitalism wants marks. No, not that marks. I'm talking about marks, M-A-R-K-S. You know, people who get taken in by a scam. You don't need to be a communist to realize that banks and corporations love to take advantage of people who don't know how to manage their money. And even if you're one of those people who loves capitalism and doesn't trust communism, which I don't understand. I mean, what has communism ever done wrong? You have to admit that there are some corporations out there who are trying to scam you. Now, am I saying that if you know where your money is going, all your financial troubles will go away? Of course not. But by seeing how much you spend and where your money is going, you can finally... Number three, form a plan. Now, at this point, a lot of financial experts would say, if you stop drinking lattes, you'll retire a millionaire. Which is an asinine statement to make. Because as you keep track of your finances, you're probably going to find that the biggest costs are the things you have the least control over. Like your housing, your car payments, and your medical bills. And you're not alone. As I said earlier, wages are stagnating while the cost of living is going up. And as a society, the only solution is to, you know, implement a communist government because... Things always get better under communism. The first hard pill we have to swallow when dealing with our finances is that there are things beyond our power. That's why it's important to take control of the things we can control. Now the best case scenario for keeping track of your finances is you'll find you're paying for things you never use. Like a video streaming service you never watch because there are seven million streaming services out there that none of us asked for. But truthfully, there's probably some stuff we're going to have to cut back on. Now look, I know when somebody says you need to cut back on something, your justified response is to say, why do I have to cut back on things when billionaires waste millions of dollars on things they don't want let alone need. And you're right, that's not fair. I'm not saying life is fair. All I'm saying is you can choose how to deal with life's injustice. You can fight back, come up with a plan and go kick capitalism in the teeth. Or you can sit back on your computer, do nothing to change the system and complain about how unfair life is. It's up to you. You can do what you want with your life. You just can't say you were never told. So once you see where your money is going, you can form a plan on how to save. As I said before, our main objective is to save 10 to 20% of our income. But how do we get there? Well, if you've never seriously built savings before, it's probably not the best idea to start saving 20% right off the bat. The best way to start saving is to use 1% method. No, not that 1%. Look, the first month you're trying to save, just put away 1% of your income. The second month, 2%. The third month, 3%. Keep adding your percent until you reach your goal. If this sounds simple, that's because it is. Personal finance is simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. It just requires discipline. No, not that. Discipline. You know, the kinds your parents talked about. I know. When you got this lecture as a teenager, you thought your parents were idiots. Well, let me tell you something about your parents, kids. They were idiots. Not because they told you to save your money, but because they didn't follow their own advice. They got into financial straits even though they were probably making enough money to retire with ease. They did this by making bad financial decisions like subprime mortgages or buying a lot of junk they didn't want. Lucky for them, they can probably rely on entitlements to bail them out. But those probably won't be around when you retire. In all likelihood, they'll be stripped into the dustbin of history. The point is, if you don't want to be anything like your parents' kids, take my advice. Start putting your money away right now. Quit thinking it's lame to have personal finance goals and, as said, think of it as... Part 3. The Revolution. So you say you want a revolution. Or you follow a lot of socialists online who say they want a revolution. Well, you know what? That sounds really appealing right now. I'm all on board for a good, old-fashioned, peaceful revolution where we overthrow the old capitalist regime, implement communism, and re-educate those greedy capitalist pigs. But if I have one critique of today's socialism, it's that it focuses too much on capitalism's external apparatus of oppression. The state subsidized monopolies, the dismantling of trade unions, the militarization of the police, and the constant surveillance of the masses. Things that never happen under communism. And while we should definitely talk about the external apparatus of capitalist oppression, I feel we do a great disservice to the working class if we don't address internalized capitalist oppression. Now, I'm sure there are many fine Marxist scholars out there who have written many fine articles defining internalized capitalist oppression. And if you know of these scholars, please send me a list so I can promptly ignore it because nobody cares about academia. I define internalized capitalist oppression as the belief that a person's life is only worth the value of what it produces and consumes. Now, unlike most online intelligentsia, I give the average person the benefit of the doubt and say that on average, most people aren't stupid. Intellectually, we know that money is in happiness. But subconsciously, capitalism bombards us with the message that consumption equals fulfillment. In other words, to consume more, you need to work more. And to be real original and quote fight club, we work jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't want. All of this is to explain why if you're a socialist, as many young Americans say they are these days, you need to start taking control of your finances now. And I know a lot of you are thinking right now. If I'm a communist and hate capitalism, isn't trying to save money and responsibly investing in the stock market and banks a contradiction? One could argue that being financially responsible is a way of enabling capitalism. But if you stop to think about it for more than a second, you'll find that's a ridiculous statement. Because as we discussed earlier, capitalism does not want consumers. It wants people it can scam. And the less you know about personal finance, the easier you are to scam. And that's why, if you call yourself a socialist, it's important that you take control of your finances now. Because taking control of your finances is an act of revolution. And I'll be the first to admit, it's not the sexy kind of revolution where we storm the best deal, overthrow the bourgeoisie, but it is important because by taking control of your finances, you're overthrowing internalized capitalist oppression. And until we overthrow the oppression rooted in all of us, no revolution will ever be successful. I'm Comrade Rourke, and you are the Revolution. Produced in collaboration with Fort Collins Public Media, if you have any questions, comments, or death threats, please email us at communistfinance at gmail.com or follow us on Twitter at Comrade Rourke.