What are the 5 most important decisions you can make right now about money?
As I was reading the book “Ask and you will succeed” (by ken Foster), this question really caught my attention.
I realized I had several decisions I wanted to make about money, but have not been making them. “I’ll do it tomorrow” was the typical excuse. Does it sound familiar? If it does, then NOW is a good time to make those decisions.
Ask yourself, “What are the five most important decisions you can make right now about money?”
For me, one of them is to start tracking all the money I spend, whether with a credit card, check or cash. Cash expenses are always the hardest ones to track and they add up very quickly. It is usually the small expenses that are the easiest to forget about.
So I prepared a Word document that I printed on business card paper with a simple graph where I can write down all my cash expenses for the day. Then I stapled together 6 business cards (printed on both sides with the graph I prepared) like a small booklet, so I can use one a week. At the end of the week, all I need to do is enter those expenses in Quicken. If you print it on both sides of the business card paper (I used Avery # 8371, but you can use even plain paper) and put 6 together, stapled in the middle, you will have a small booklet you can use for seven days.
If you would like a copy of the file, you can download it here (PC Right-click and select “save target as” to download)
Cash Purchases word document Once you save it to your computer, print it on both sides of the paper and cut them out.
I strongly recommend you start tracking your expenses. When we started doing it some time ago, we had all our expenses tracked to the penny and it was incredibly useful for our finances. I slowly stopped doing it after a few months (it does take some work, but it is worthwile). I am starting tracking our expenses again, and I will keep you posted on my results.