Money cleanse
I’m not broke yet. And honestly, I doubt that I can be, because as someone has so often told me, I’m not extravagant. But then, I’m also a serial saver who tends to treat herself to an infrequent series of medium-scale shopping sprees when the spirit leads, so I can say that person doesn’t really know me.
However, regardless of my lack of extravagance and the infrequency of my spending sprees, I must admit that I’m bad with money.
I have no investments, no assets, no budgets and I don’t keep track of where my money goes.
When I sit and think about it, I’m ashamed to admit that the bulk of my monthly expenses go into wants and not needs. A mani-pedi, for example, is not a necessity. A year before now, I was doing perfectly fine with self-manicured nails — even though they never looked as nice 🤷♀️.
Regardless, when you, like me, have gotten to that stage where you’re forced to re-evaluate your relationship with money, you’ll admit that having Netflix suggest Smart Money Woman is definitely not a coincidence.
I binge-watched the first season and by the time I got to the third episode, I already knew that I definitely needed to do a money cleanse.
Much like a wardrobe cleanse where you get rid of the things you don’t need or use in order to give room for what’s essential, a money cleanse is a financial purge. Lol, same difference I know, but you get the point.
The essence is to review where your money goes, starting with the past week or month, group your expenses into different buckets and identify needs vs wants. Cancel/boycott your wants and then prioritize/streamline your needs.
This is me talking to myself btw, and since it’s me we’re talking about, this is how I would do it.
Cleanse.
The truth is that habits don’t change overnight and a healthy dose of pep talk won’t help you automatically manage your money better either. The best path is to become a monitoring spirit. Monitor your money and monitor it weekly. Use any tool that’s convenient, just ensure that everything you spend daily is accounted for at the end of the week. If doing your accounts at the end of the day works better for you, do that.
I created a page in Notion “Money Tracker”. The Notes app on iOS or Andriod also works fine tbh, so does a simple Google sheet. The point is to create a system that helps you track where your money goes.
I intend to do this for the next couple of months; tracking my money and eliminating the non-essentials. I think that even if you earn a lot, this helps you build discipline. And once you achieve discipline with your money and control your expenses, then it’s possible to start exploring healthy investment options.
New money habits.
I’ll follow up my cleanse with new money habits. I’ve decided that examining and considering the necessity of an expense is a simple way to approach this.
- Is this something I need or just a nice to have (want)?
- Can my current monthly income support this?
- If I were to lose my primary source income today, would I regret spending on this?
Now, I barely know anything about finance. In fact, I’ve been dodging my mother’s propositions for me to sit for ICAN or ACCA certifications, so kindly note that this is only a public journal of how I intend to manage my current financial situation. I am not offering financial advice.
That being said, I have it in mind to create a one-page Money Cleanse guide that can serve as an easy reference for anyone who wants to try this out. It would cover:
- Why you need to do a money cleanse.
- How to go about it (thought process)
- The Money Tracker sheet (template)
- Money mindset (questions to keep you in control of your expenses)
In startup fashion, this guide can’t be available in version 1 of this article, but I promise it’s coming soon and I’ll update this article once it’s ready.
