Not managing your expenses can get expensive. Yeah, that’s right! Put that on a meme with a sunrise because it’s a new day! A day to change the way you manage your expenses. And how do you do that?
If you don’t have an expense manager set up yet, then now is the time. This is your article. You’re here because you earn an income, but are bone dry every week. You’re here because you want to achieve your financial goals before your ship comes in. You’re here because right now your expenses are managing you, and not the other way around.
Good. Let’s do this. Because that’s why I’m here too.
Why?
Why an expense manager? Because if you don’t know where your money is going, you’re in trouble. And we were in trouble. We were running out of money before the end of every week. We had no buffer. Nothing to protect us against calamity. And guess what happened. Oh I’ll tell you.
First, the car dropped dead outside a vineyard and we had no money for wine let alone to fix the car. So we lived as a one car family for 2 years. Then, the washing machine broke and we had to start double wearing our pants until a friend gifted us with a working machine.
Then the worst thing happened: we had to sell our home.
When you have no savings, no cash reserve, you are subject to the whims of the universe. Not to mention interest rate changes, cost of living, real estate market…etc. We had no control over what was happening externally, but we did have control over our expenses. But we had no expense manager. No system in place. We had no idea what was happening to our money.
We were over extended and it got out of hand.
If we had been managing our expenses properly from the beginning we might not have met with such financial catastrophe. Or at least had more options when the poo struck the propeller.
What Expense Management Means to Us
What it really means, is control. And even though we’ve had to start again from scratch, we’ve got our power back.
Expense management is the key to achieving your goals. So what are your financial goals?
Ours is to own a home again. Only this time, we’re doing it differently. We have about 8 smaller financial goals we need to achieve before we can start on our main goal, but it’s all laid out clearly before us now.
And we’ve done that by committing to an awesome expense manager. We let go of the foolhardy notion that we’re too clever to need help. So here’s what we did.
We downloaded TrackMySubs. Yeah, sure, I write the blogs, but that just means I already knew how good it is.
It doesn’t change the fact that we were in desperate need of an expense management system. And TrackMySubs came into our lives right when we needed it. This is the expense manager that is going to get us our new house.
Budgeting
Making TrackMySubs work for us, means we had to take control of our budget.
First, what were our current expenses? That means we had to look at everything. Debts, credit cards, household bills, online subscriptions, insurances, etc. Then we had to trim out the excess. No more spending more than we earned.
By entering every expense into TrackMySubs, we can see all our monthly and yearly financial commitments. And we can see where we’re throwing money away.
Half a dozen streaming services? I think I want a house more than I want Spotify, to be honest. We’ve culled it down to Netflix. It’s our one luxury, and we love it.
For everything else, we sought out better deals. Cut out some of the extras from our health insurance. Reduced our weekly food expenditure. It was only a little bit for each item, but those little bits add up to serious savings.
Now when things get tight, we go straight to TrackMySubs and can see exactly where our money is going for the month. If there’s room to cut back somewhere, we do that. If not, at least we know exactly where every penny is going and when. We can be prepared each week.
So Why A Web Based Expense Manager?
Fair enough. You could just scribble out a quick budget based on your income and stick to it. Just takes some discipline, right?
Sure. And once you’ve filled out all the info, you can just reference it like any old budget.
I’ll tell you why that’s a dated system. Because TrackMySubs is an expense manager with tech. Which means once I’ve set it up, it takes care of business.
It sends me an alert to transfer funds to my credit card in time for the electricity bill. It sends an alert to a client to remind them to pay their invoices so we can get paid. It reminds me to transfer money to savings every week, so we can start to build that buffer again. It reminds me to cancel that old gym membership I signed up to a year ago before it renews.
Guess what I can do with that $12 a week now? Hello savings account.
And that’s how a good expense manager works for you. You don’t need to constantly stress anymore about where it’s all going. It’s in one place. You can look at it and review it any time you want, but I hardly need to.
I’ve put everything in there, and I custom-designed all the alerts. It’s impossible to miss anything now. I only need to check it when I’m changing or updating something.
And with the TrackMySubs Chrome Add-In, you can even quickly add new subscriptions as soon as you sign up for them just by clicking on the TMS icon in the corner of your browser.
The point though, is we know we can achieve our goals now. We know where every penny is going. We are living within our means, and we can see straight away if we’re getting too close to the edge.
We’re going to get that house one day, and it’ll be because we took responsibility for our money. An expense manager like TrackMySubs can help bring you back from financial suffering.
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