My Story

After 3 years of being a mother, I decided to quit my full time job to raise my child. That was the beginning of my money struggles. We went from 2 incomes, to only 1 while the bills and everything else remained the same. The following 3 years I started feeling completely broke. I never bought anything, and our money still disappeared. Up until that point, I never looked at my credit card statements until the due date. I made sure to pay it off, but was always shocked at how high that bill was. 

As a result, I felt I didn't have any money for things that weren't essential. I only purchased what I needed for myself, and yet I couldn't bring that credit card balance down. 

I had heard many stories of people who went bankrupt and kept hiding their credit card statements, I also heard a guy say that everything could be resolved by quitting the coffee shop - I didn't really go to coffee shops, but I got the idea. 

After some deep thinking about this, I realized that we did earn enough of an income to not be broke all the time. I started to look. One day, I opened up excel and started adding up all the transactions in my bank and credit cards. My discoveries were astonishing! 

• We spent too much money buying wine

• We went grocery shopping multiple times a week, and bought way more food than we could use

• We were paying too much for oil to heat our home, we could be using a different company for less

• We were paying too much for garbage collection, the service was terrible and the fees were super high

• We had subscriptions to services we no longer used 

• We were not looking at the prices of anything when we bought them - especially groceries and wine

I don't quite remember how I ended up with my Money Tracking workbooks as it exists now, but I know that at that point I needed a way to keep track of everything. I used to use mint.com, but that was pretty useless for me. I never looked at it, and when I did it was too complicated to customize. Creating my own worksheet, gave me the power of flexibility to add whatever I wanted, wherever I had to. It also forced me to be honest with my finances, and really get to know my our spending habits. With that knowledge in hands I was able to make an impactful change. 

I created set amounts to be spent toward any given category I identified. I checked in weekly to see how our finances were doing that week. If we spent too much on any given category, we would slow down for the rest of the month. This process allowed me to know exactly how much money we needed a month to cover our bills, and I even found some extra money for fun things and for an emergency fund. I automated savings wherever possible and started to feel less broke. Within 6 months, I went from feeling broke to feeling abundant. I my case, it turned out to be a matter of taking a close look at my spending. Changing those habits and having a plan were crucial.