It has become a natural habit for me that every Tuesday morning I take an inventory of my financial well-being. Why Tuesday you ask? Because all of my charges and transactions have not yet gone through yet by Monday morning! I have an automatic payment set up for every other Friday (oddly it coincides with payday?) for a very large amount of money to be sent to the evil Sallie Mae. This transaction usually does not clear until Tuesday morning, so it gives me all day Monday to try and remember what exactly I did over the weekend.
I started keeping a tally a few months back of how I was looking from an overall week to week standpoint: How much credit card debt I have and how much money I have to pay it off and what expenses do I have for the upcoming week? This evaluation on a weekly basis has helped me to shrink my credit card, both by paying it down and using the cards less.
Being cognizant of the overall picture of my finances has definitely been lost over the last few months, I could give you a bunch of reasons, but none of them would be good ones. This little Tuesday morning routine has forced me to pull my socks up and start chipping away at the problems that plague my financial decision making (The bad ones are when I am not sober).
I still use Mint.com (Who just got bought by Intuit), but this Excel sheet has been serving as a list of action items for me to make stuff happen. Anyone can sit there and read the numbers on the screen, but real progress is made when we follow through with action items or to-do lists on a weekly basis. That goes for anything life: Money, women, sports, school, etc.
Have something you want to change in your life? Write it down, put a picture up of it and look at it every day, and force yourself to make changes, even small ones. Only a few months left in the year of 2009, make some changes before it ends and its time to make another New Year's Resolution that you won't follow through on. Be easy.
I started keeping a tally a few months back of how I was looking from an overall week to week standpoint: How much credit card debt I have and how much money I have to pay it off and what expenses do I have for the upcoming week? This evaluation on a weekly basis has helped me to shrink my credit card, both by paying it down and using the cards less.
Being cognizant of the overall picture of my finances has definitely been lost over the last few months, I could give you a bunch of reasons, but none of them would be good ones. This little Tuesday morning routine has forced me to pull my socks up and start chipping away at the problems that plague my financial decision making (The bad ones are when I am not sober).
I still use Mint.com (Who just got bought by Intuit), but this Excel sheet has been serving as a list of action items for me to make stuff happen. Anyone can sit there and read the numbers on the screen, but real progress is made when we follow through with action items or to-do lists on a weekly basis. That goes for anything life: Money, women, sports, school, etc.
Have something you want to change in your life? Write it down, put a picture up of it and look at it every day, and force yourself to make changes, even small ones. Only a few months left in the year of 2009, make some changes before it ends and its time to make another New Year's Resolution that you won't follow through on. Be easy.
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3 comments:
I completely agree with you on writing things down as that helps you to reach your goals faster. I use Excel and Mint (and Quicken) but the Excel spreadsheet gets the heaviest use for me when tracking my finances and managing my budget.
Good luck on getting that net worth up into the positive area.
I am perennially nervous of putting anything online or allowing anything access my accounts except for myself.
So, I stick to Excel :)
@Lulu cant agree with you more, gotta do something to hold ourselves accountable, doesn't get much better than using MS Excel. As for my Net Worth... in the positive? Give me a few years!
@FB I understand your nervousness, I do have that about many things, I guess I am blindly trusting Mint to keep my info safe and secure. Probably ignorance on my part.
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