3 Simple Things You Can Do Today To Increase Your Wealth

Having a budget is a quintessential tool to ensure you can have a strong financial foundation. It helps sort the information regarding your finances, and displays it in a simplified visual aid. A budget can do amazing things for everyone to keep your money habits healthy. Similar to your own health, what do you think will happen to your budget if it isn’t taken care of or “exercised” to be kept current? Well, if it is like our own bodies, it will eventually suffer health problems. So what can you do to help?

1. Rework the process

I tend to check out physical fitness stuff quite a bit. I want to know what the best exercises are and how I can help stay fit (sorta). If you regularly workout, there are likely some key exercises you know of which you can easily do if you are struggling in other areas to get you back on track. The same is true with budgeting. If your budget is not performing like it should, perhaps go back to the basics? Start over by tracking your expenses and income. See where the cash flow is moving in reality. From there you can recreate a budget that will best fit your current lifestyle and NOT how you thought you were living.

2 The details matter

A good budget will have the different categories broken out to accurately see where your money is going. These categories are often reflective of the following: housing, grocery, auto, insurance, medical, personal, credit cards, etc. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this approach to having a budget. In fact, this is the exact type I give away free here. However, if you are tenured in the budgeting scene, it is probably time to make some changes. Consider breaking out your categories further. Instead of groceries and home goods, breakout the typical companies you buy things from under them. For example, our household buys quite a few items from Amazon. Thus, we would list the amounts we would need under our sub-category Amazon for home goods or grocery. Understand the details. 

3 Savings will save you

One of the common misses I have seen with clients is in their savings. Savings is a must in ANY budget. If you are struggling to pay your bills every month, you might be pondering NOT saving any money in an attempt to pay more towards debt. This is a complete and total fallacy. Imagine if you will a scenario. Imagine struggling with money and paying $100 extra towards your debt every month instead of saving it for the future (let’s say an emergency fund). That $100 will go a long way towards your debt, which is great. You have been doing this now for 12 months. Now, imagine you have a sudden transmission issue in your car. It is not a matter of needing to be replaced, just fixed. You can dip into that extra $100 a month you have been SAVING right? Wrong! You have since decreased your overall debt by $1,200, but you are now being hit with a $1,500 expense. Instead of using that $1,200 towards it and only adding to your debt $300, you have now added back your previous debt with an additional $300! You have to save.

These are three of the simplest things you can do to keep your financial health up to date. It will not only make your budget better, but it will also help to increase your overall wealth. Nothing will happen though, if you do not take any action!