By Cherie Lowe
I wish I had an instant fix machine. You know, kind of like that red button for a certain office supply store? House is a mess? Boop. Press that big red button and instantaneously your bathrooms are well scrubbed and the floors are swept.
Mount St. Laundry building in your bedroom? Boop. Everything is washed, dried, folded and put away in the blink of eye. Put on a few pounds? Boop. You’re fit, trim, and wearing those jeans you had given up all hope of ever fitting into again. Relationship woes? Boop. All of your issues are resolved without a single therapy session.
You get the point. I’ll keep hoping and wishing that science and technology will make all of my wildest dreams come true. But the odds of a big red button to fix all of my problems in a flash will likely remain just out of reach (at least in my lifetime). Instead, if I want to make change, I have to continually come back to the fact that cleaning up messes and making headway in the areas I long to improve is slow and steady work.
Boring work, filled with monotony, is where change happens. Unfortunately, the visible effects don’t appear overnight. We might even feel like nothing is taking shape.
When it comes to managing your money, success rarely happens in grandiose fashion. No one instantly figures out how to roll in the dough without putting in hard work first. A motivational speaker once quipped, “Success is never owned; it is only rented — and the rent is due every day.”
If you want to be successful in any area of your life, it takes work. But the good news is that with a few systems, you can manage paying the rent.
Begin with reconciling
Keeping track of your spending and your bank account yields the greatest success when it comes to managing your money. When I speak to kids about personal finance, I attempt to demystify the word “budget.” Our culture and inner fears can often convince us that budgeting is beyond our grasp or a scary technical process that we won’t be able to endeavor unless we have a degree in economics.
This is far from the truth. In the end, a budget is simply money in and money out. Daily reconciling of your checkbook, whether you use a piece of software like Quicken, an old school ledger, or an online program like Mint or Every Dollar, is simply seeing what you’ve earned and what you’ve spent.
Keep bills in one place
There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to track down a bill. Online billing has helped streamline some of those organization challenges; however, you may still be receiving paper bills, too. Open your bills as soon as they arrive in the mail.
Toss the outer envelope and place the bill and return addressed envelope in a drawer or central location with other bills. Take a quick moment to arrange the stack, ordering by due date. When your budget indicates that a bill is due (it’s wise to schedule payment a week before due date), write your check and drop it in the mail.
Always keep the receipt with you
“Do you want the receipt with you or in the bag?” The answer should always be with you. Receipts in the bag easily get thrown away or lost in the shuffle. Your receipts should all be kept in the same place so they’re easy to locate in case of a return or to document your expenditure.
Once you make it home with your purchases, be sure to transfer those receipts to a designated location. It might be in the same area as your bills or if it’s something that can be written off on your taxes, it should be dropped in a file or box for that purpose.
Monitor your accounts
Each week, spend a few moments clicking through your accounts. Whether it’s your mortgage, your student loan lender, your retirement savings, your Paypal account or your credit card account, you need to log in on a regular basis to check for suspicious activity.
You also need to keep tabs on your progress toward your greater goals. On your internet browser, set up a tab with all of the accounts linked in a bookmark so you can easily access that information. A careful eye helps you continue to reach toward your goals and clean up any potential messes before they get out of control.
Managing your money is far from glamorous. The work isn’t filled with applause or daily affirmations. But over time, keeping a good record and making strides toward your goals really works. Our debt of $127,000 wasn’t paid off overnight.
We made “rent” every day. And four years on the side of it, I can tell you it was totally worth it. There might not be an easy button or an instant fix, but healthy money habits become more natural the more you practice them.
Greenwood resident Cherie Lowe and her husband paid off $127,000 in debt in four years and now live debt-free every day with their two kids. She is the author of “Slaying the Debt Dragon: How One Family Conquered Their Money Monster and Found an Inspired Happily Ever After.” Send questions, column ideas and comments to [email protected]
