A friend asked me a hypothetical question the other day.
If your house was a disaster, you had unexpected company (say your mother-in-law) arriving in five minutes and you only had time to clean one thing, what would that be?
I chose vacuuming the floors. Even if everything else is a disaster- there are dishes in the sink, toys scattered everywhere and the bathroom’s a mess, having clean floors would make me feel in control of the situation. Conversely, if my floor is filthy I have very little motivation to clean the rest of my house and it gets worse and worse and worse.
My budget is the same way. If I check my online bank accounts every morning, I feel in control of my budget, no matter how much money I have, and am less like to spend money on impulse. If I go several days without looking at my statements, I develop a devil-may-care attitude. I lose touch with my money and my financial house becomes just as dirty as my real house.
How about you? What helps you to feel in control of your finances?
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{ 3 comments }
I’m like you. I have to check and know for sure how much we have in the bank every single day. I don’t care too much about the savings accnt, since I only make deposits in it. The checking account is a different story since that is the one account that sees the most action.
Oh yes, checking every day helps. Currently my laptop is broken so I can’t and I’m having to really really really increase the willpower. When I can see it, I feel better about not spending it!
I’m with you on vaccuming and I’d also throw everything that wasn’t in it’s place in a closet!!
One of the great benefits of getting rid of so much of our stuff is that it doesn’t take nearly as long to clean everything. In the case of a surprise guest, I’d quickly check the toilets and/or kitty boxes (those count as toilets, right?) to make sure they weren’t gross and, assuming they weren’t in need of cleaning first, I’d then check the sink to make sure it wasn’t gross.
I don’t check my accounts daily because I don’t spend or even go out daily. Bit of a homebody, I admit. But I do try to check the accounts before buying stuff. For my “fun money” account it’s more important since I keep that rather low much of the time, but our joint account has $1000 buffer in it for small emergencies, automatic bill pay mishaps (it happens), and so we never overdraft. We still try to check it regularly, though, just to watch our spending — even though we’re much better about our spending nowadays.
My husband and I used to put all our account balances in a spreadsheet every Sunday, but after a year and a half of that we now can trust ourselves to just do it after each paycheck after the regular bills clear (roughly every two weeks). It’s been an invaluable tool for us. It was only after we started checking our account balances regularly that we turned things around and started getting out of debt instead of into it even more.
.-= Meg from FruWiki´s last blog ..Ice cube trays =-.