Are you ready to take control of your personal finances, get control of your spending and work on achieving the goal of getting freed up financially? If so, I challenge you to take the Show Me The Money – Challenge during April’s National Financial Literacy Month. The show me the money challenge is the first step in taking control of your personal finances and transforming your financial life.
What is the Show Me the Money Challenge? It is a personal finance challenge that focuses on tracking all of your expenses for 30 days to provide insights and ideas on how to cut, reduce or eliminate unnecessary expenses, and help you start saving money.
Show Me The Money – Challenge
- #1 Goal – Make it fun, get creative, but also be 100% committed
- Track “every dollar” you spend for minimum of 30 days
- Create a ledger with expense categories
- Break out every expense into a specific category
- Expense Categories – the more specific the better i.e. separate dining out, from groceries, category for Starbucks, school lunches for kids, etc
- Track ALL cash purchases
- Enter each individual charge card expense into a specific category
- Enter ALL of your fixed expenses for housing, insurance, utilities, etc
- Total each expense category at the end of 30 days
Step Up – Accept the Challenge and Change Your Life Forever
I hope you will accept this personal challenge. It is about challenging yourself to take control of your personal finances and work on achieving your hopes, goals and dreams for your life. It is about breaking free of our consumer driven world and becoming debt free. If you have children it is also about setting an example for our children. Therefore, I hope you will commit to this challenge starting this Friday, April 1st, 2011. What better time to get control of your finances than during April’s National Financial Literacy Month. There will be numerous tools and free resources available to help you work on changing your financial habits, improving your personal finances and improving your financial literacy.
Challenging Our Family
My family and I completed this challenge last year. We were blown away at how much money we were wasting every month. We were only able to identify these unnecessary expenses by tracking every dollar we spent and keeping every receipt for 30 days. This simple exercise dramatically impacted our spending habits and has freed up a lot of money. It has been over 6 months and we want to take the challenge again.
My wife and two teenage kids discussed this last night over dinner. We are all committed to taking the Show Me The Money – Challenge again. We are starting this Friday, April 1st, 2011. Our teenagers will also be tracking every dollar they spend as well. This is a great opportunity for us to teach our kids financial literacy skills that will last a lifetime. I will provide some updates throughout the month on our progress and also our revelations regarding our spending habits. I hope you will share your thoughts with us as well.
The Guarantee:
I guarantee you that if you will commit to this challenge for 30 days you will be blown away by what you learn about your spending habits and where all of the money goes on a monthly basis. More importantly, I guarantee that the results will provide you new insights and ideas on how to cut your expenses, improve your cash flow and use the monthly savings to become debt free, build up your savings and investment accounts. This simple challenge will dramatically impact your personal finances. I guarantee it!
The Results:
What can you learn from tracking every dollar you spent for 30 days? Look through your credit card statement at each transaction and ask yourself if “you would have made the same decision if you had to pay cash”. Look through your cash receipts how much money are you spending our small things that add up over a week, a month, a year or a lifetime?
More importantly, ask yourself where can you cut or reduce unnecessary expenses to improve your monthly cash flow i.e. health club membership, dining out, cell phone bill, cable tv, internet, commuting costs, car insurance, discretionary or random shopping purchases, etc.
Ultimately, we live in a consumer driven world and it is our spending habits that are consuming our financial future. Therefore, we must all take control of our spending habits if we ever want to become debt free and achieve financial freedom in our lives so we can pursue our hopes, goals and dreams for our lives.
Take the Show Me The Money – Personal Finance Challenge. It will change your life and your finances….
Do you know someone who might benefit from taking this personal finance challenge? If so, please forward this article to them. Encourage them to take the personal finance challenge with you. You can encourage each other to stay committed for 30 days.
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