personal development

How to improve your finances

August 29, 2020Rabea

Finances can be an anxiety-inducing thing to think about, but the best answer to anxiety is to rationalize the topic at hand. Here are some tips for how to improve your finances.

What do you pay for monthly, quarterly, yearly?

Having an overview what you pay for monthly, quarterly and annually can help tremendously if you want to reduce your expenses. Maybe you should change to a more affordable company for your phone or stop a subscription to a certain magazine. We need way less in life than we think.

What can you get rid of?

This might be a slow process. At least it was a slow process for me. I tested out which services I paid for monthly weren‘t relevant enough anymore. For some things that is easy to test by simply canceling a subscription for a month and subscribing again if it is absolutely needed. With other things it‘s a bit trickier, but I‘m sure you‘ll slowly figure out what you can throw out from your expenses.

What is your goal?

This is also super relevant. There are different ways to go about finances if your goal is to pay off debt compared to planning finances to put more into savings. There are different steps you might want to take for each to get the most out of it. Get clear on what your goal is with your finances. That can go from stability, over saving to paying off a loan.

Did you research ways to reach that goal faster?

We all hate the lingo of finances, but have you looked into every possible way to get to your money goals faster? Maybe there is a better way to save and invest your money. Maybe you can change something about the monthly payments for your loan. Is there a safer way to go about keeping your money secured? There are so many weird little things a bank can do positively and negatively when it comes to saving and paying off. Be sure to know all about it. That also means double-checking what the people in the bank told you.

If you had all the money you currently make and would start from zero, what would you pay for?

This is more about one-time-payments and on-the-go spending, but it is an important prompt to always think about when you‘re about to spend money or plan your upcoming expenses. What would you pay for? A longterm solution instead of a short term one, right? That means putting a coffee machine above your daily to-go coffee. That also means buying fewer books and with more intention. It means buying certain foods in bulk while not buying other foods at all. Think about this in-depth and write down your findings.

Are there cheaper ways to do the same thing?

Does it have to be the name-brand thing or can it be the off-brand version? Can you buy this on black Friday or a summer sale instead of right now? Are there any similar applications and programs that came out recently that might replace the ones you currently use? Would you rather pay $15 a month to play all Ubisoft games or pay full price for all of them? Can you pay only half the year for Netflix because you really don‘t watch it that much after all? These are just some things to think about. Think about cheaper alternatives that might even be long term.

These were some of my prompts for how to improve your finances. Getting these things figured out and written down can clear so much anxiety about the topic. In case you want to change your life in other ways too, I have a freebie for you to download. It‘s showing you ways to change your life to a more positive one today and you can get it by joining my newsletter squad below: