I’d been a student of money management for a few years when I finally decided I needed to figure out how this budget thing worked. I’d been reading books about women and money and prosperity and I loved how I felt as I was taking in all of this information, but it still didn’t feel good to have or manage a budget, so I avoided that part. My father is an accountant. He’d sent me budget sheets before but I was so deeply disinterested in them that I remember once suddenly becoming very sleepy while looking at the sheet. It was like I’d just remembered that I’d been awake for hours and hours and hours and I was just . . . soooooo . . . very very very sleeeeeeeeepy. When I closed the document, the sleepiness went away, though. So, I figured that that meant that the budget document was a bad thing and I’d conquered it with the power of my mind and the escape button.
I’d bought journals over the years with the intention of tracking my finances. And, I usually found them, months or years later with a few pages filled in and then plenty of blank space for me to start again. Usually, the sight of those made me sleepy, too. So back into boxes they went.
I finally reached a point in my finances where I had to face the fact that actively avoiding them wasn’t doing me any favors. In fact, what I knew about managing money and what I was doing with my money were not at all in alignment.
So, I tricked myself.
I bought a cute little green notebook. I wrote Budget Book or something like it on the outside. I knew my plan was to get a concrete sense of my expenses each month and that, in order to do that, I needed to start at the beginning of the month. I also knew that if I put too many restrictions on myself on how to do it “right”, this book would be just like all of the others. So, I dropped it down in my purse and then one day (that just happened to be the 4th or 5th day of the month), I decided to write down every single thing I purchased. And then I did it again the next day. And the next and again the next.
I didn’t always write things down as soon as I spent the money. Sometimes I’d have to catch up on several days’ worth of purchases. Sometimes, I had to accept the fact that I’d lost a receipt or forgotten the specific number of cents (or even dollars) and write down an approximation. But I’d finally decided that no matter what, I’d stick with it. I was done with managing my finances from a fearful place. And a big part of the fear that I was feeling all of the time was simply not knowing what was going on with my money. I was ready to feel differently and to take action differently.
After 3 months of this practice, I had a crystal clear sense of where my money was going, what my expenses were and where I was wasting money. After about six months, I could list all of my monthly expenditures with ease, and I’d found that sometimes I preferred not to bother spending money because I didn’t feel like writing it down, I’d evolved my method for managing my finances and felt more excited to take care of business. After a year, I could feel that I was well on my way to a completely different relationship with money than I’d ever had before.
Here is a step by step guide for How to Start Following Your Money
- Acquire your budget book.
- You want something appealing- I found a cute little book that gave me happy feelings when I looked at it. When I’d look down in my purse and see that little book, it made me feel good about the steps I was taking. After a while, the good feelings about the book carried over to and influenced my feelings about managing my money. I turned it into a feeling of play and those positive feelings made me want to play more.
- You want something that is small enough that you can easily carry it with you everywhere. I’d had a hard time sticking with this practice in the past because my books were journals that were too large or bulky to put in my purse. Once I started using books that were easy to carry, it also became much easier to simply write down what I’d spent while I was out and about. (Over time it also became easier to see how much I was spending in a day when I’d have to pull out that book multiple times over the course of a few hours).
- Write down everything you spend every day for 3 months. I learned that after a significant adjustment to my finances (like an increase in salary or an increase in expenses), it would take me about 3 months to figure out the basic rhythm of my money all over again. A 3-month view gave me a clearer sense of what my averages were. You want to keep things easy at the beginning and just note your spending without judging or assessing. Just by that practice of neutrally observing myself, I started to make little changes.
- Look back and notice your patterns. What are the times of the month when you tend to spend more? Do you tend to fritter or make large purchases? What are the areas where you often overspend? Do you go on shopping sprees? Do you feel better after a purchase and use buying things to soothe yourself? When I went back and reviewed, I noticed that I often went over budget toward the end of the month (when, as Dave Ramsey puts it, I had too much month left at the end of my money). I saw that stress triggered overspending. I also saw that I tended to fritter away money (as opposed to making big purchases) and that I liked to spend on going out to eat and what I considered “good food” (meaning food that tasted good to me, was of moderately good quality and expense and, most importantly, that I didn’t have to cook, myself).
- Set goals. Once I had a handle on what was going out and where it was going, I was able to start making more conscious choices for my money. I figured if money was going to go out anyway, I’d feel better if I made the decisions about where and how it departed my bank account. I also set savings goals so that I started getting pleasure from not spending.
- Be consistent. As with anything, consistency makes all the difference in this process. I started making money management dates with myself to go over what I’d been doing in the previous couple weeks. I also started making monthly dates with myself to plan what I anticipated my finances would look like for the coming month. I created a budget of my basic monthly living expenses and also established a budget for my discretionary spending that was reasonable and sustainable.
The most important thing is to be easy with yourself. Unless you are in dire straits, you do not need to make this process harsh or unpleasant. I’d tried forcing myself to manage my money through fear and shame. There were some times where it made me take action, but more often, it made me want to hide or fight something. When I started making my money process a more pleasurable experience, I began to look forward to it and as my emotions around my finances began to shift, so did the amount of money I had to manage.