Every journey begins with a single step, and mastering your finances is no exception. While getting your financial house in order can be daunting, this blog series aims to guide you through the process in a practical, step-by-step manner. Whether you’re a complete novice who has no idea what you are spending, or you’ve already dabbled with budgeting apps or spreadsheets, this series will be a practical and no-nonsense guide to basically knowing a bit of everything that is needed for your finances.
Our journey: an overview of the course
Diving into personal finance can feel overwhelming. There’s a sea of books, courses, and conflicting opinions out there, all claiming to have the secret sauce for financial success. Personally, I found it quite hard to determine the idea: where do I even start. That’s where this blog comes in. My goal is to provide you with a clear, step-by-step roadmap that cuts through the noise. By following this path, you’ll build a solid foundation in personal finance, piece by piece. No frills, no complex jargon – just practical, actionable steps to understand and manage your money and behavior effectively.
Okay, there will be a little jargon in this blog series. To better explain the financial journey we are undertaking I will be using the metaphor of a temple. So let’s take a deeper look at your Temple of Money Wisdom.
- Foundation of your Finances: We’ll start with personal reflections on money, get to know ourselves and set clear financial goals.
- Pillars of Insight: These represent the core of your finances and are the must known numbers for your financial system. What comes in, what goes out and what is left.
- Pillars of Refinement: We’ll refine our understanding of expenses by categorizing them in certain pieces, which we can apply to cutting out the useless stuff in our life. .
- The Ledge of Behavior: The hardest part of budgeting, getting a grip on your (spending) behavior.
- The Roof of Growth: Once we have a grip on monthly finances, we’ll cover saving and investing.
- Maintaining the Temple: Finally, I’ll share strategies to keep your financial temple in good order.
Our building materials
Within the world of personal finance, numerous tools are available to track your expenses: integrated budget functions within your bank app, budget apps that can immediately gather data from your various accounts, and many features you probably won’t use. While these apps can be very helpful and make your life easier, I believe that knowing the core of how all these apps do their calculations is more important. And that is why we are going back to basics and will be using a simple spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is used for both filling in the numbers and to make some personal notes on your finances.
You can download the spreadsheet “here”.
While it may not be the most elegant or visually appealing solution, I assure you that you’ll gain a thorough understanding of the backend of any budgeting app. Since your finances may be spread across multiple bank accounts or investments in various applications, it will help you a lot to maintain a single source of truth for your financial information.
What is the best way of following “this program”?
● Stop reading this on your phone and open your laptop. Give your finances the respect and the screen size it deserves. I highly recommend using a computer with a large screen so you can have both the spreadsheet and this article open side by side. Besides that, keep your phone with your bank account app ready.
● For each blog in this series, I suggest setting aside 30 minutes of your time.
● Try to do each blog on a separate day or session. Don’t overwhelm yourself with information.
● This is a progressive journey: start with blog 1 and continue onwards.
Some final thoughts
My intention is to give you some practical skills and tooling in the bite size format. Probably along the road I might miss a certain subject or niche that you are interested in, and that is fine. This is a work in process project and might add or adjust the blog posts later. So, if you have any feedback or recommendation, please contact me using the socials or the website page or leave a comment in the section below.
Besides that, doing your finances, collecting fixed expenses or looking at your bank account, can feel extremely overwhelming and sometimes really scary/shocking. I understand that, but still just do it. I do not want to linger on too much why it is a good idea to put your finances together, as you know it will make sense in the long run and will give you more peace of mind. Putting your head in the sand is not going to make the world better and I believe that taking good care of your finances will bring an enormous amount of peace of mind.
With these motivational talks done, let’s start building our Temple of Money Wisdom!