One of the most fun parts of setting goals is seeing yourself getting closer to them with each step that you take. By tracking your progress, achieving financial excellence is not just a great end goal in itself, it will also become a fun journey with many smaller milestones to work towards to and keep track of along the way.
You can track your progress for many different financial aspects, such as your net worth, your savings, the debt you are paying off, your emergency fund or your pensions. The options are endless.
Some simple ideas you can use to track your progress:
- On a piece of paper write down the amount of your goal, for example $10,000 if you are looking to increase your net worth by $10,000. Every time you put money towards your goal, write down how much you contributed, cross out the old amount and update it with the new outstanding amount.
- Get some graph paper – the one with the little squares – and determine how much each square represents: $5, $10, $25…. Draw a box around the number of squares that represents the amount of money of your objective. For example if you are trying to pay down a $5,000 debt and you decide that each square represents $50 saved and put towards this goal, then you need 100 squares: 100 x $50 = $5,000 to represent your entire goal. Every time you contribute $50 you can colour in or cross out one of the squares.
- If you are saving your money in a bank account or paying down debt but like the idea of a coins jar to see your progress (see also day 11’s challenge) you can find a nice jar and put it other items (buttons or marbles for example) for every $25 saved. In this way you can still see your coins jar grow even if the money is safely tucked away in a bank account.
Go ahead and decide on at least one goal you’d like to start tracking and create a visual tracker that would work for you. Take a photo and feel free to share it on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram with the #31DayChallengeToFE hashtag. More ideas on creating trackers can be found in Step 92: Track your Progress, one of the 100 Steps of the mission to financial independence.
100 Steps Mission 