Hello and Welcome to Day 1 of the 31 Day Challenge to Financial Excellence! We are going to dive straight in and start with the first Challenge of this month: Track your Expenses.
When you start keeping track of everything that you spend, you gain valuable insight not just in where your money goes each month, but also where you might be able to save some money as well as taking steps to aligning your expenses with your long-term goals.
If one of your goals is to start your own business at some point in the next 3 years, and if you only have $500 of the $10,000 that you calculate you need as start-up capital saved up, then you clearly need to up your monthly savings.
You can start tracking your expenses in different ways: in a notebook in a digital spreadsheet or in an online app such as Mint, YNAB or EveryDollar. Whether or not you have time to investigate these different options now or not, make sure to start logging your expenses today regardless! You can always spend some time later on to compare these programmes and then transfer your notes over.
Remember not to just register your cash expenses but also any payments you make with credit and debit cards, transfers, PayPal, standing orders etc. You want to know about all your expenses here!
Good luck getting started and make sure to log in to the Facebook Group to say you have completed your first challenge or to let the rest of us on Twitter know, using #31DayChallengeToFE.
If you want to read more about tracking expenses, you can find out more in Step 3 of the 100 Steps Mission to Financial Independence.
100 Steps Mission 