Taking Control of Your Finances: Part 4 - Pay Attention

This is a small step.  In fact, it's a teeny step, but it is monumental in making your finances work out for your good.  One of the biggest ways to start saving money and to stop spending, and paying attention to where money is leaking out, and tightening the proverbial pipes may just make all of the difference. 

I mentioned this before when I told you all that I would be incorporating an "online spending" segment into our budget, simply because we cannot pay cash for those things, and if there is a place money leaks, it's getting our credit card statements and going, "Hmmm, I didn't realize I spent that much," and the expenses usually stem from a $20 purchase here, a $3 purchase there, a $17 purchase there, and by the time you're done you have a credit card statement that reads $100.  (And a zero based budget that now has to be manipulated to pay it off.) 

So the question is, where are you leaking?  Is the leak in your gas tank and the money that goes into it?  Is the leak in buying a Starbucks coffee every morning?  Or an extra toy for your kid once a month?  Or going out to eat?  Maybe it's a soda out of the soda machine a couple times a day 5 times a week.  Pay attention to where your money is going!  Maybe it doesn't mean cutting out that soda (either completely or at all), maybe it just means working it into your budget somehow so you are cutting back somewhere else to indulge in that thing that is of a higher priority to you. 

So for June - watch for leaks, then you do the plumbing! 

Let me know how the financial revolution goes in your life! 

-A