Okay, to be honest, I'm one week in and have never been more excited about my finances in my entire life. I really feel like the reason why is because I'm tackling this issue head on, and putting forth all of my energy and time to changing my financial life. So many times in life, we try and tackle all of our problems at once. We set goals for our finances, our health, our spirituality, our relationship, the list goes on and on. But then, our energy is stretched so far and thin between trying to do all of it, that we don't see much progress in any of the areas we're trying to improve. I have seen this time and time again. So, this semester, my #1 priority is getting my finances in order (by using the plan I wrote about in post #1 and will continue to write about and make changes to.)
With that being said, I will still focus on my health and take care of it, but it will become my #1 priority once I get proper finance habits in place. So, for example, if I want mozarella sticks from Sonic for dinner really badly, I can run to the grocery store and get mozarella sticks, take them home, and cook them for dinner. While this may seem like I'm eating unhealthy, I am first and foremost getting in the habit of just getting food from the grocery store, not fast-food or sit down restaurants. I'm just training my mind to make this a habit.
In a month or two when I'm not so tempted to spend money eating out and I always resort to the grocery store as my only option, THEN I can set another health goal, like: Only eat sugar 2x/week, or something along those lines. But so many times, I have sat down and decided, "Ok, I'm not eating out, I'm not eating sugar, not eating meat, only going to spend $20 this week, going to cut up all my credit cards, reach my scriptures for 1 hour every morning at 5 am, going to run 4 miles/day, etc etc. and by day 3 of trying to keep up with all of these changes, I'm burned out and back to square one.
So what makes sense for me, right now, is to tackle my finances head on and then add in more goals/changes a little later down the road after I see some progress. K, done ranting.
Last night I really wanted to go to McDonalds. But I remembered that I am 100% to not eating out, so I went to the grocery store. Did I buy healthy food? No, I bought a Mountain Dew and a Twix. Is that ok? Yes, because I am getting in the habit of not going to restaurants. I won (in my book) by going to the grocery store..It's the little things. Change is about the LITTLE THINGS! THE LITTLE HABITS! "By small and simple things are great things brought to pass" -- AKA By small and simple changes in my habits will great things (financial freedom) begin to be part of my vocabulary and part of my life!
It's crazy how when we rely on the Lord and trust in Him, miracles happen. HE is aware of my situation and HE is helping me change a little bit each day. I couldn't do it without him.
*Random Note - Eventually I want to purchase books about investing and use apps such as "acorn" and "Robinhood" to learn more about how to make my money work for me instead of sit there w/o accruing interest or anything.
Just to give myself an idea of the progress I'll be making over the next 100 days, here's what my finances looked like on August 23, 2017 (day 1 of this transformation)
Checking:
Savings: $0
Emergency Fund: $0
Investments:
Credit Card Debt:
Car:
Student Loan: $5,000
Write on blog:
Cancelled Spotify premium $9.99/mo
Cancelled amazon prime
Cancelled Netflix
Monthly subscriptions & payments are SO unnecessary!
Finance plan: only buy shoes or clothes at goodwill and DI
*dave Ramsey - decide how much I’m going to put into savings every year beginning in January of 2018. $2,000?
Include in blog:
Frustration and helpless feeling of not having money when referral bonus didn’t come through and paycheck didn’t direct deposit. I want to get to the point (financially) where if money doesn’t come in on the exact days I had budgeted it for or in smaller amounts than what I had expected, it won’t be a huge deal because I’ll have a good enough cushion to be totally fine, be able to pay my bills, buy groceries, and still have money. Moral of the story? I want to be able to live paycheck to paycheck and be able to have road bumps come without even affecting me, rather than sitting here at work super stressed because I have no idea when my check is going to come. Same thing with me hearing my FA is delayed. Stressed and hopeless. If I had money in savings, it’d be no big deal at all!
Finance plan for blog:
$1000 in savings
Debt snowball
No eating out (sonic water is the only exception
Say no! All the time! Miss out on outings with people and accept that that’s ok.
When I want to eat out, go to Broulim’s and buy something that I normally wouldn’t. But no deli food.
No clothes/shoes/accessories/Amazon purchases till cc debt is gone.
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