Money Listens

It’s April 1st, the start of a new month. Now is the best time to begin to get your financial life in order. Say to yourself, “I’m not spending any money today.” And keep repeating it. See how many days you can go without spending money. If you haven’t made out your spending plan for the first paycheck of the month, do it today. Plan out where every dollar is going to be spent. Transfer some to your savings account first. Grab some twenties from the ATM and put cash in envelopes for food, clothing, eating out, blow money and whatever other categories you want. Then hide the envelopes in your sock drawer. Hide the credit and debit cards in there, too. When the kids beg you to go through the drive-thru, honestly say, “I don’t have any money.”

Do you have one of those little spiral bound memo pads? Or how about an index card? Don’t go out and buy some, use the back of an envelope. Each time you are tempted to spend money and resist the urge, write down your savings. Add it up each day. Pat yourself on the back. Do it again tomorrow. Get in the habit of not spending money. But don’t stop there. At the end of the week or month, take the cash from the envelopes and deposit it into your savings account.

If you must go out to a lunch meeting, have a bowl of soup or something inexpensive. Don’t think about what you’re not doing or not able to have. Think about what you are doing. You are building a savings account for emergencies, you are making sure your kids have a college fund, you are going to have a retirement fund. Look back at your memo book or the back of the envelope where you wrote down where you were tempted to spend money. Do you want to trade your future for any of those things?

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Spending Less and Less. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.