Tracking For Financial Fitness

Imagine a Weight Watcher's meeting with no scale, no food journals, no accountability. How would you gage your progress. It's Impossible to really show significant impact on your financial life with out any controls. Tracking your income and expenditures is vital for Financial Fitness. The actions of recording and reviewing your financial information with an unbiased approach makes introducing new behaviors easier and quantifies the change. Consider for instance the amount of money that you spend on dining out each month. With out tracking this expense it would be impossible to know exactly how much you are spending and it is easy to spend a lot on expenses like this, because the amount that gets doled out at each restaurant is nominal. However these expenses tend to add up quickly. For example imagine that you stop for a quick breakfast and coffee each morning and and that that breakfast costs you an average of $4.00 each day. Also, at lunch time you go out for a quick pick-me-up lunch that costs you an average of $6.00 per day. If you work 5 days per week, this cost you roughly $217.00 per month ($10.00 per day time five days per week time 52 weeks per year divided by 12 months) or a whopping $2600.00 per year. may of us spend much more than this just on meals out not to mention other small incidentals and often end up wondering where our money went to.
It is crucial that you know where ALL of your money is going to if you want to be in control of your financial life. Take a minute each day to list all of your income and expenses and the tally up what you are spending on incidental items. How could you eliminate some of that expense? Could you pack your lunch twice a week (at an approximate savings of $624.00 per year)? Or perhaps, you could make a breakfast at home in the morning (approximately $1040.00 per year saved).
There are literally hundreds of places to find hidden money, but with out tracking your income and expenses you will not have the information necessary to find these hidden treasures or to take action.