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Knowing some simple money management tips aside from budgeting won’t affect your journey to financial stability. As a matter of fact, it helps you become versatile when it comes to your finances and money. But let’s be honest creating a budget can be overwhelming. Especially if you are a newbie to the concept/act of budgeting. So to know some other money management hacks and tricks is not a bad idea anyway.
There is no doubt budgeting is extremely important. It helps set financial goals, make financial plans, save money and overall manage your money. Hence, this post is not designed to tell you that budgeting is old-fashioned or not important but to show you the many ways you can be in control of your money.
Here are the simple money management tips you can do without doing anything too serious that will give you the results you want in no particular order.
Shop with a list
Anytime you are going out to shop as long as you are not just going out to buy one item. Make sure you make a shopping list. This money management hack is designed to guide you when you go out grocery shopping and other household items. With those types of shopping, we often go overboard with our spending.
To make a list more effective writing the prices beside each product gives you an almost accurate estimate of what you should be spending.
Why is a list important?
It helps you remember exactly what you went to buy. To avoid forgetting the major items and end up buying the not s important things.
With the product prices on your list, you will know when you have gone overboard in your spending. Always feel free to return items there is nothing embarrassing about managing your money. It is for your own good.
track your spending daily
To track your daily expenditure simple means to be accountable for every cent you spend in a day. It implies that if you left the house with $50 and you came back with $5 at the end of the day. If you were to report to someone, you should be able to give a breakdown of exactly what you did with $45.
I have written a detailed yet simple way to track spending in this post on how to stop spending money. If tracking your daily expenses looks like something you need to be in control of your money then do yourself a favour and read it.
Automate your savings
One financial goal budgeting helps you achieve is saving money or having an emergency fund. So what if you don’t get to make a budget does that mean you won’t get to save money?
Heck no! With or without a budget you can save your money without fail. Simply automate the process and you are just fine.
How to go about it
In case you are wondering how you go about automating your savings. You need not worry because the process has been made easy all thanks to technology.
Some of the amazing ways are to automate through your bank, by creating a saving account that once your income shows up an amount approved by you will be deducted to your savings account. Or you can use apps, here are the best money-saving automation apps.
The “be sure” exercise
One way to know you overspend money or have a bad spending habit. is that you always end up having unused things you bought. You bought a thing and it’s still sitting around you haven’t used it. You have no idea when you will use it and have forgotten what you even bought it for in the first place. Well, you definitely have a spending problem however, I’m not here to tell you that. But you might need to consider knowing how to stop overspending money.
The “be sure” exercise as I call it could be given any name but this is how best I can describe it to help you avoid the above spending problems I just mentioned. Though writing a list will help you but it’s kind of limited as most of this wasted shopping doesn’t happen when you plan on shopping. They often happen when you are out, excited and something just caught your attention.
Hence, to be on the safe side take a moment and ask yourself some very important questions. If it is something you need at the moment or it can wait for later. Ask yourself if it’s really important or not? Is it a need or a want? If I make a one-time payment will it affect me or I’ll be fine for the rest of the month? Like ask yourself all the important questions just to “be sure” you won’t end up wasting money.
Conclusion
As I made it very clear from the beginning budgeting is not overrated or unimportant. It is definitely one of the ultimate ways to crush your financial goals and become the best money manager for yourself. However, it can be overwhelming sometimes especially if you just started practising it. In other not to lose your balance when managing your money just because you couldn’t come through with creating a budget at a specific time. You can always be in control of your money with these hacks.
Hoping that these simple money management tips have opened your eyes to a new dimension of money management. I don’t know which of these money management hacks you are going to try first. But I would love to know which one you find new and exciting in the comment box. My own favourite is shopping with a list and doing the “be sure” exercise.
