There was a time in my life when I was always running short of money, no matter how much ever I would earn, it was never enough. I was always in scarcity mode and by end of the month it would get extremely difficult for me to keep up even with the basic expenses. I had to change, because that was not the right way of managing finance.
My dad had this habit of maintaining an income and expense diary. In those days we had no computer or mobile phone to maintain a tracker so it was all manual and I would maintain that diary for him. I thought of starting the same habit for myself. In the beginning I started noting down all the expenses that I made on a daily basis. For a month I did that and then at the end of the month, I went through every single day expense to see what were the ones that could be cut out. I realized there were so many unnecessary expenses. For e.g. first half of the month I had multiple food orders, I was buying clothes and shoes which were actually not needed, then getting some junk things which were not being used and lying in one corner of the home.
After tracking all the expenses and evaluating them, bucketing them in what was required and what was waste, I started to avoid the wastage things. It did not change in the first month itself. I was doing those things for a long time, so it was not that easy to suddenly stop, but I could reduce it, and then over the months I could completely stop. The next step was to map my expenses against my income on a quarterly basis because there were light expense months and then there were heavy expense months. So, I had to create the balance. Because what was happening was in the light expense months when I had some money saved at the end of the month, I would feel happy and splurge it. And then in the months when there were more expenses like festival and celebrations time then I was again struggling.
It took me a year to streamline this whole financial process. Sometimes these small leaks we do not realize and these are the ones that are actually not allowing us to build our wealth. It may seem like nothing but over a period of time the small savings become a big corpus. Daily financial planning is not about becoming a miser; it is about building yourself.
Try tracking every single rupee you spend on daily basis for one month. You will see that eventually that will bring you financial stability.
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