New Years Resolutions: Month 1
So far, so good.
We didn’t make whole lot of New Years resolutions but the one that I felt was most important to our financial health for 2007 was having a budget and knowing where we were spending our money.
I mentioned earlier that I have used Quicken for the past year but did not find it very helpful in keeping our spending under control and was searching for something better this year. By better I wanted something easy to use, idiot proof and cheap.
Our plan for this year was to use a 3X5 index card to record our expenses each week, keeping the cards organized in a small box. Then at the end of the year we will have 52 index cards to shuffle through.
I can report that so far it has been a success, abiet a one month success. It has been the most useful in helping us eliminate most of our day to day convenience expenses.
I leave the card on the kitchen table and it takes just a minute to jot down what I spent that day. By leaving the card on the table it is easily visable and a good reminder at the end of the day when I have a million things running through my mind.
Big expenses like plane tickets, Rent and insurance really throw off the average but I am continuing to follow those monthly with Quicken. Lets hope our two prong approach will be the ticket to good expense management for 2007. With no real hope to increase our income for about 2-3 years, any change in net worth will be from eliminating outflows and not from increased inflows.
