Getting to that million dollar mark is a goal that many people have not just entrepreneurs and as we talked about in the previous posy building a business is not the only way to get to the million.
Having good money habits and investing it correctly and consistently can get virtually anyone to hit that million dollar mark.
So let’s go over some easy to do habits that we can incorporate into our lives that will make it easier to get to that financial goal.
Get a Money Notebook (For Tracking Expenses)
It is surprising that many people don’t have a clear and visually easy way to understand their finances. It is practically impossible to improve our financial life. If we don’t even know what’s happening with it. The more we understand our money the easier it would be to manage and improve it.
And it doesn’t have to be complicated a good way to start is to have a money notebook. This notebook will be used exclusively to track your monthly budgets. It can be as simple as an income and expense tracker. Where do you write down, How much money you made this month? and How much money you spent in both living expenses and non-living expenses?
And just by doing this simple exercise that takes less than 20 minutes to do every month, you begin to understand exactly where your money goes and your financial behaviours. Once you understand your finances you can tweak and modify your budget to fit with your financial goals.
Don’t Use Cash
I know this is a controversial statement because there have been studies that show that many people tend to overspend when using credit or debit cards over using cash. But once we are fully aware of our monthly budgets it can be beneficial to use electronic forms of payment.
Because we can easily track our spending most banks and credit card companies have apps, where we can check every single transaction that we made. This makes it much easier to keep track of our expenses because we don’t have to rely on memory to remember what we spent on and how much, we can just log in and check.
Checking your Expenses Daily
It is great having those tools that allow us to keep track of our expenses. But if we don’t use them consistently then they have very little benefit to us. It actually takes very little effort to actually do it. All you have to do is pull out your phone open your banking apps and check your accounts it takes less than 30 seconds, but it allows you to check on what you’ve spent over the course of the day. You see many of us don’t realize how much we’re spending until we check so if we check our accounts daily we will be fully aware of our behaviours with money.
Lower Your Expenses
The first three habits were all about tracking and understanding your finances now that. We’re using the tools to track our expenses it is time to actively manage our money. Now that we can easily see where our money is going a simple yet powerful habit is to take a look at those expenses that don’t need to be there. We can start with those expenses that don’t really make sense.
If you like watching Television and you have all the services like Netflix, Youtube TV, Amazon prime video and Disney plus, you might have an overlap and chances are you end up using only one or two of those on a recurring basis.
So it doesn’t really make sense to pay for all of them when you’re only using a couple. But they are draining your bank account. Another place where we can save money that is often overlooked is some utilities like newspapers. Most of us have internet in our homes and we typically signed a year or multi-year contract with the internet provider. But if we check our bank statements after that year passed your 45 a month internet bill is now 85 to 100 Dollars per month.
Some people might not notice and some others just think that’s the way it is. But a simple 15-minute phone call to your provider can bring your bill back down and save you hundreds of dollars per year.
And the third category that we can start saving money on is our small daily expenses that 4-5 Dollar daily coffee that dollar 50 water bottle and that 3 dollar snack might feel insignificant. But if done 5 days a week can cost you up to 180 dollars per month or 2000 Dollar per year. So looking for these little expenses that are unnecessary and easy to cut off can save us thousands of dollars every year.
Assign a Spending Budget
It is important to cut off things that take our money away. But it is just as important to enjoy your money. Assigning a spending budget that you feel comfortable with will not only help you do the things that you enjoy but will help you avoid overspending. Since you have a predetermined limit on your spending.
For example, let’s say that you have an income of 5000 Dollars per month your living expenses are 3000 dollars per month. so you have 2000 dollars per month left over at the end. You still want to save money so you decide to allocate an 800 per month budget to spend on anything that you enjoy. You can spend this money as you please and still be able to save 1200 dollars per month.
Now depending on your income and your expenses, you should adjust the spending budget to something that you feel comfortable with. A good strategy to make the best use of this spending budget is to make a list of the things that you enjoy doing those things that add value to your life and genuinely make you happy and only spend your budget on those things that genuinely make your life better.
Saving Money
Saving money is easy a lot of people feel that saving money is hard. But it doesn’t have to be you can take a percentage of your income and set it to automatically transfer to your savings account at the beginning of the month or whenever you get paid. It only needs to be set up once and that’s it. You are saving money every month without lifting a finger.
Investing
Just like automating your savings account which makes it super easy to save money automating your investments will make building wealth just as easy. All you need to do is connect your savings account to your investments fund and set up automatic investments with just a couple of tabs and just like that you are growing your wealth without even thinking about it.
Proper Use of Credit Card
Yes, Credit cards. Another controversial one but using credit cards has a few benefits.
1) It allows you to organize your spending. For example, you can have one credit card that you only use for the monthly bills that you normally pay every month and another one where you use it for your monthly spending budget. This can help you keep different categories separate and make it easy to keep track of them.
2) It helps you build your credit score when you have a few lines of credit and pay them off on time you build a great credit score that can grant you access to a world of benefits like lower interest rates. In case you want to buy a house or a car get easy approval. If you’re looking to rent an apartment and some jobs even look at your credit score to determine how reliable you are?
3) Rewards: Many credit cards especially in the United States have many incentives like cashback, miles and points.When you use credit cards to pay your normal monthly expenses instead of using cash or a debit card you spend the same amount of money that you normally would. But you get to earn rewards like miles which can be redeemed for free travel or cash back. Which is basically free money just for paying your regular monthly bills. Of course, it is important not to overspend with credit cards.
Credit cards have high-interest rates that is why it is important to pay the balances in full every month. This way you get all the benefits without paying any of the interest.
Talk About Money
Money is one of those topics that isn’t talked about much on a regular basis by the average person. Although it is an important part of our lives and most of us want more of it. So why not start talking about money whether it’s at your job with your spouse or even with your kids. Having healthy conversations around money will make it much easier to exchange ideas with one another which can help us learn to make better decisions and who knows maybe even get you a race at work.
Reading A Financial Books
Read a financial book a week, again this is a habit that might sound difficult at the beginning but it really isn’t. For example, if you’re not much of a reader or are a slow reader, you can put an audiobook on the way to work and on the way back the average person has a daily commute of around 50 minutes a day.
A good audiobook is between 3-5 hours long. This means that a person can listen to at least one audiobook per week just on their daily commute. This can elevate your thinking and your knowledge about money budgeting mindset investing and much much more.