No matter what your passion, if your aim is to help others who are struggling with the same issues you are, one of your toughest challenges will be to convince others to abandon the fruitless practices that you had difficulty abandoning yourself.
For decades, every attempt I made to gain control of my finances started out by tracking my past expenses. Therefore, I was not surprised to discover the Where’s My Money Going? Month series of blog posts on the Finance for a Freelance Life blog which encourages its readers to join in the expense tracking fun.
First, please do not interpret this as an attack on the Finance for a Freelance Life (FfaFL) blog. You will find much helpful information there and I encourage you to check it out. For those of you familiar with Dave Ramsey, I love his concept of free spirits and nerds. Now, this may shock some of you, but bloggers tend to be a pretty nerdy bunch which is probably the genesis of FfaFL’s rather nerdy tendencies of expense tracking. Hey, you don’t think any of us free spirits could even conceive of such a practice, do you?!
The habit that I would like to break among those struggling to gain control of their finances is this notion that expense tracking is somehow linked to budgeting. After decades of blind obedience to that school of thought it occurred to me that trying to control where my money was going by tracking expenses is about as effective as trying to lead a horse by its tail. What I finally learned was that the only thing knowing where my money was going did for me was confirm something that should already have been painfully obvious to me, I’m lousy at managing money!
I knew there had to be a better way and I figured it would likely start with walking around to the other end of the horse and picking up the reins. Why not do the budget first?! Yes, I’m serious. In decades of financial futility it had never occurred to me that the best place to start was with a detailed, financial plan, AKA a budget.
Why does budgeting first work? Because it puts you in control. You know your income. You know your obligations. You decide who gets paid how much and when. Then tracking expenses becomes trivial because you spend what you planned to spend IF you’re disciplined. Tell your money where to go and you’ll never wonder again where it went.
As if the Where’s My Money Going? Month series wasn’t a big enough set-up, this month’s posts include some very insightful reviews of the current generation of expense tracking apps. I’ve tried most of the apps covered in the review, and many more that were not. The bottom line is though that every attempt I made to gain control of my finances by tracking expenses failed no matter how slick the tool was that I was using to track them.
Even though many of these apps has a “budgeting” component, no two seem to share the same concept of what a budget is and most of them should be renamed “spending goal” or “spending target” components.
That is why Dewayne and I created BudgetSketch® to be a laser focused budget creation tool. We built it debt free, just like we hope to be one day, with no fluff, no ads, and no cost. If you’re ready to take control of your financial future, if you’re fed up with wondering where your money is going, AND TIRED OF TRACKING EXPENSES, why not give BudgetSketch® a try?
