If you’re feeling additional pressure these days in sorting out finances and dealing with debt, mortgage specialist Lisa Gryba says you’re not alone.

“It’s difficult, right? It’s hard for people to plan with things that are beyond our control,” Gryba says.

Results from a recent Leger poll show four-fifths of respondents had started or planned to buy cheaper items at the grocery store to save on food bills and plan to cut back on how much food they throw out to stretch every dollar.

the plan and to re-visit the details to make sure they continue to be relevant. She suggests breaking down income and expenses into a bi-weekly plan, to find out what your cost of living is and planning for payments that are smaller but more frequent.

“I encourage people to create sub-accounts with the lender that they’re at. And on a bi-weekly basis, you can either get the lender to automatically transfer into these sub-accounts.”

Another option is to make those transfers manually. Gryba says some people choose to follow this type of format by using cash and envelopes, to make it easier to see how much money is available for each category in the budget.

You can listen to the podcast with Carly Koop and Lisa Gryba as they talk about how to find out what it costs you to live, streamlining debt, payment structure, creating a plan and how to stick to it. 

 “We want to streamline all your debt," Gryba says. "We want to streamline your budget, so that every two weeks, we can plan accordingly. And we usually beef our budget up a little bit so that we have a surplus in all of these sub-accounts, so that when the fuel price goes up, we kind of budgeted for that.”

While planning can seem a bit daunting at the beginning, Gryba is confident that it can truly bring peace of mind as you look at the breakdown of every dollar.

“When you have your eye on the prize or you have a plan in place, these distractions become outside noise,” she says. “If we put a plan in place, and we strategically do this, we can afford for these increases to happen, and they don’t necessarily affect us in the same way as someone who kind of flies by the seat of their pants and reacts accordingly.”

Gryba says while personal financial planning is quite easy, it can become overwhelming. In those cases, she suggests having someone work with you to break down each part of the planning process.