How to Manage Your Money Action Plan Part 5 - Intention

Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a better life with money video series. My name is Stacey Powell, and I am here to help you have a healthier life and a happier life with your money.

If you're watching the video series while you're doing the book I want to give you a big, huge congratulations. Because today's video is the very end of chapter 1. and so if you made it to the end of chapter 1 huge kudos to you for starting out on this journey and making it there.

And as a little treat, at the end of every chapter I do something, that when I was a kid I thought was incredibly fun. I loved Mad Libs when I was a kid, before I decided I could actually be a writer, it made it so simple to just fill the story in. So I included something like that at the end of every chapter, and that's what we're going to do today.

You're going to tell a little story about your path with money. Why are you reading this book? What'd you learn in the first chapter? And what are you hopes and your commitments as you move forward in the book?
So the first question is, It's my intention to have a better life with money. My hopes and dreams for that better life are …. You fill in the blank.

Alright, I'm going to sit here for a second. I want you to grab a pencil, and I want you to actually write that down.

Did you do it? No really like if you didn't do it go get a pencil and write it down. Hit the little pause button, I want you to write that down. I want you to be really clear with yourself about why you're taking a few minutes to watch this video. Why your taking time to read this book.

What are your hopes and dreams? Because if you're just doing this so you can learn something about your money, that's not motivation enough. Money is the thing that fuels our hopes and dreams. So if you're not clear about that, this is a great time to get clear.

So a couple of other things - you can turn to chapter 1 at the end and fill this out. But if you don't have the book, I'm going to let you know what a few of the other “fill in the blank” sentences are.

So when you were sketching out the big picture that was in the last few videos, I realized that the areas I most need to focus on are … fill in the blank.

And the other thing I realized was, Thank goodness I'm already a rock star at x. What are you a rock star at? We're all good in some area of money, some little area for some of us. But we're all really good at something with our money.

So what did you see? As you worked through parts of looking at the big picture.

And last, but not least, to get healthier I'm going to commit to working on my money. How many times a month? How many times a week? For the next, how long?

I want you to write that down too, and then I want you to tell someone. You can put it in the comments below on YouTube, that's fine. You can join our Team Do Better group and let us know. And I'll check in on you from time to time.

If you tell me how much you want to commit to working on. I promise I'll check in with you. God knows, I could not do this alone when I started doing this. And I want to help you get better with your money.

As always, no way you're alone, so come over to Facebook and join our Team Do Better Group. Or join one of our Finance boot camps. You can find those at www.thefinancegym.com or subscribe to our YouTube channel and keep watching these videos.  See you next time.

Meeting 2014 Spending Goals

Leah wrote a great New Year's blog on the importance of telling the truth to herself about how much food she eats. In it, she admits that she realized she ate enough on Christmas Eve to feed a small village. It was knowledge and clarity she gained by logging her calories on a nifty app (Noom). I go through periods of logging my calories and it is indeed clarifying, and sometimes even shocking. But it takes work. You have to log in every little thing. Annoying. You’d think they would invent something that would just link to your stomach and directly sync your stomach to the app and it would know how much you ate, what the nutritional value was, and tell you how to adjust for the rest of the day, week or month. Ugh, so hard.

Ok, that’s a bit *sarcastic*. But when compared to how easy it is to track your money these days, there’s little comparison. Using an app like Mint makes monitoring your adherence to your goals super simple. It syncs automatically. A few minor corrections here and there, and you’ve got great data. And when you think simple, you can make budgeting even simpler. 

What do I mean by that? Well, don’t let yourself spin out by trying to assign budget amounts for every category they have, or even every category you spend money in. Mint has 21 major categories and each of those has an average of 5 subcategories. Wow. Who wants to keep track of 105 spending areas? It’s overwhelming, and thus not very motivating.

If you want to be motivated by tracking your numbers, do something simple and fun. Focus on what really matters. For me, that is often eating out, coffee on the run and groceries. I’m certainly not going to spend extra money on gasoline or the water/sewer bill, so why should I bother tracking it in a daily or weekly budget app. But I might be tempted to get a few more lattes than I said I would or a $30 bottle of wine instead of a $15 one. Using that passiveness of Mint lets me do that with hardly any hassle at all. It’s almost as if it was directly syncing with my bank (because it is).

In the budgeting area of Mint, I’ve chosen only the 6 areas that I think are important for me to monitor. I can pop in to the app on my iPhone or iPad, or log in on my computer. At a glance, I can see how I’m doing on that goal for the whole month. Totally clarifying.

What are the 6-10 most important areas for you to keep your eye on your spending?

-Stacey Powell

[A little disclosure. I love Mint. I use Mint all the time. But its effectiveness is for snapshots and monitoring. In my experience, it’s ineffective when you need to capture your annual income and spending, run reports for taxes or to analyze your finances. But day to day, week to week, it’s a breath of fresh air.]

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