7 FUN Ideas to Track Your Finances Using a Blank Notebook

Tracking your finances does not have to be boring. If you want to track your finances in a fun and crafty way, if you're a crafty person, then this video is for you. I have seven fun ideas for you to track your finances using a blank notebook. Go grab your notebook. Go grab some fun colorful pens and markers and meet me right back here. Hey guys, welcome back to the DebtFree Millennials channel. I'm your host Justine. Here we talk about all ways to achieve financial confidence, crush debt so that you can have a life with more fun and fewer payments. We are going to be using a blank notebook. Tracking finances does not have to be this high tech thing because I find when you are on your computer or your phone, it's just easy to keep it in an app and then you kind of forget about it. With a notebook, you're actually physically writing things down so that you can track it. Now, I am using the DebtFree Millennials uh really inspiring financial notebook. You can head over to my shop, debtfreemillennillennials.com/merch to pick this up, but you can certainly use any old notebook that you have lying around the house. So, let's head over to my desk and I'll show you some of those ideas. All right, so the first idea is a daily expense tracker. So, the way that you're going to set up your page is you're just going to title it daily expense tracker. And I created four columns. So you'll have a column for the date, the expense, the category. So the expense could be Target, Kohl's, Amazon, but the category is all shopping. And then the amount. So the idea is to write down everything you spend on a daily basis, including any in-person and online purchases. That way you get an idea of, oh my gosh, I've been spending like 10 different times in one day and it creates a lot of awareness around that expense and the spending habit and perhaps gives you some ideas on how you can replace the spending with contentment. Contentment comes from doing activities that don't cost you any money but provide a lot of joy and a lot of happiness. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I will leave a link up to one of the videos where I talk about that in the cards for you to check out. So, the way that I would do this is if I spent money today, I'd place today's date. I would say I went to Aldi's, this is groceries, and then I spent $83.11. And then it's important to keep your receipts at the very least or do this. Write down the expense as soon as you get home, as soon as it happens. Maybe even keep your notebook in your car if you're constantly out and about spending money. But this is a great habit to get into. Let's look at the next page and next idea. So this is the weekly budget. So instead of creating a 30-day budget, which can be really daunting for some, just try budgeting for the week. So, over the next seven days, you'll track any income and expenses coming in and include the planned stuff like bills and unplanned things like swinging through Target. You can set goal amounts and then record what you actually spent at the end of the week. So, if I was going to set this up, what I would do is I would record any income that I knew was coming in for the week. So, if I was getting a paycheck and let's say that paycheck was $2500 and then I have the expenses, but I don't know how many expenses I have for the week. Then I'm just going to write down what I know, what bills are coming up. So, maybe my electricity bill is happening this week and I can preemptively look on my account and see that I'm going to be charged $123. And so when it actually happens, then I'll go ahead and write in that amount, $123. Next, I need to go to the grocery store. So I can write groceries here. And if you don't know how much you're spending on groceries, I really encourage you to do a spending audit, which looks at the last 3 months of history for that particular category. So you're just going to go into your credit card or bank account statement and look at every single time you've made a transaction at a grocery store and then take an average of the last 3 months of spending. And then you can use that average and you can put that in your planned column. So if I knew what my average was for the month, let's say it's $400, then I'm going to do a planned spending budget of $100 for the week. But let's say at the end of the week after the seven days, I've added up how much I've actually spent on groceries. Let's say it was actually more like $184. Now I've created some awareness here to know that I actually need to bump up my planned budget for this particular category. So you can keep going and say like Netflix is coming out this week and that is $15. I've got Target run so shopping I want to plan on spending no more than $75 here. So then you can start adding this stuff up and then record it in your expenses here and then see what leftover amount you have or just do it on your calculator as you go. Just take 2500 and subtract the let's see, we've got about 300 bucks here, maybe a little bit more. And now we can start planning out our paycheck and budgeting accordingly. All right, fam. Let's take a look at the next fun idea. I love this one for a new car savings goal. So whether you're buying used or new, you can plan ahead for that car purchase by writing down the estimated cost. So here I really want a Jeep Wrangler. It's been on my bucket list for like the last 10 years, but then I had kids and you know what? Little babies and toddlers aren't the best for Jeep Wranglers. But okay, so I've estimated the cost and let's call it it's going to be about $35,000 for the Jeep Wrangler that I want. And I know that because I can look at the mileage and then the years to look at. Typically, I'm looking at used cars that are around 3 to 5 years old. So, I'm looking at 2020 and above. And let's say I want to get this Jeep Wrangler and I've got time, you know, I've got cars that work. So let's say I want it in 5 years. So that would be by 2030. So actually if I do 2030 and have the gold date, then my years to look at is 2025. But you get the picture because cars always depreciate year-over-year. So if I want to have $35,000 in 5 years, all I need to do is get into my calculator, divide $35,000 by 60 months. So, you've got 5 years time 12, 60. And so, I need to be saving $583 per month. Here's where I can stop and say, is that doable for my budget? Is this actually realistic or is this like way out of the ballpark for me? So, do I need to go down to 250 and maybe take a look at a cheaper vehicle or is this something that I can really start striving for? Every single month, I like to set up automated contributions into a high yield savings account that's earning more than 3% currently at the time of this recording. Things change, of course, but what I like to do is just track the date, the amount saved for the month, and then total save. So, if I'm saving, let's say I want to save weekly, and I want to do today, and I want to save, let's say I have $600 right off the bat. So, even though your target monthly savings amount is 583, let's say I'm just going to go for it and do 600. So, total saved is 600. Let's go to the next week. If I want to start saving weekly, but I'm like, h, I can't really make this amount. Then, let's say I can add just an extra $30. Now, the total saved gets bumped up to $630. You can do this however you want to. You can track it the way you want to track it. This is just a really easy template to follow and then you can customize. If this is the target, but you can't always make it, that's okay. It's life life happens. Unexpected expenses happen. But this is a really easy way for you to track and save for that new car purchase. And physically writing it down is going to actually help you keep up that savings habit versus just doing it on your phone or doing it on your computer every once in a while. When it's on the electronics, I feel like it's really easy to dismiss because you're constantly being bombarded and distracted with things like social media or your inbox. This will keep it top of mind so long as you have this out in some place where you can see it. All right, this next idea is really, really fun. I love doing this exercise with my one-on-one clients. All you need to do is for the next 14 days, write down every time you go to restaurants. So, I picked restaurants as a category because a lot of people have trouble spending in this area, overspending in this area, but you could pick any category that you want. So, 14-day contentment exercise for shopping, for beauty enhancements, for whatever. Maybe you have a Lego obsession and you're constantly buying Lego. Write it down in this contentment exercise for the next 14 days. That's all I'm asking. So, what you're going to do is you're going to track when. So, I'll say again today where I went to. Chick-fil-A is one of my favorites. What's your favorite restaurant? Tell me below where you like to really just ball out. Chick-fil-A is one of those for me. So $14.51 is how much I spent. And then you're going to see in this category. So this is how you're going to set up your page. Four columns again. When, where, how much, and then this PN and dash. This is positive, negative, or neutral. Or you can do the smiley face method. Or you can use stickers. I don't care how you do it. But this is really really important because at the end of each week, so at the end of day seven and at the end of day 14, you are going to write whether you felt positive, negative, or neutral about this experience because this helps you pinpoint which outings you love and which ones are getting in the way. I happen to know that I love Chick-fil-A and let's say at the end of the week, I was like, "Yes, I feel great about this experience." However, if I was going through some sort of health kick and I wanted to restrict the amount of times I'm going to Chick-fil-A and I knew I was starting more of this healthy eating routine, then I might not be feeling so positive about it. This is where we can start pinpointing the ideas. Perhaps you really like to go out and experience new restaurants. You're a foodie. You like to spend money here, but your restaurant spending is actually getting cluttered with really fast and cheap things from Door Dash, which aren't actually really cheap, but you get what I'm saying. If you're constantly going through fast food or drive-thrus or doing these like fast casual restaurants, but actually you really enjoy the omocaz or you really enjoy the steakhouse, then we just need to get rid of the clutter and really focus on what you love to spend money on. Great idea. a great activity that you can use with a blank notebook. Okay, let's go to one of my easy ones. This is so great. This is so great if you have the dotted like architecture paper in your notebook, but any old notebook would do. Just make a grid of squares and write down your goal, your savings goals. So, this one is meant for an emergency fund, and I put a goal of $1,000. I want you to have at least two to three months of basic living expenses in your starter emergency fund. But a lot of people don't even have that because two to three months of basic living expenses for some can be thousands of dollars. Think about just your rent or your mortgage payment alone. But a really easy way to start with an emergency fund is just a,000 bucks. Okay, we'll start there. In the grid, you can denote how much each of these little squares is worth. It could be a dollar, it could be $5, whatever. So, you can just tally this up. and kind of multiply and get an idea of how many squares you're working with. And you can always add on squares if you need to. Anytime that you make a savings contribution to your emergency fund goal, you get to color in a square. And I love this. If you are a visual person and you're like, it's not enough for me to just see the money in my bank account. Nice. But there's something about just physically getting it done this way that is so inspiring and motivating by seeing the progress and physically coloring it in. All right, your next fun idea is your monthly fixed expenses tracker. So all you need to do for this one is write down each fixed expense and track it. Fixed expenses are any expenses that do not typically change and are a necessity to your life. So think about mortgage or your rent, utilities, cell phone, internet, anything car related would go into this category. Basically, anything that is on a fixed payment. And this is really easy to get planned out. It's really easy to also know which companies are jacking up your prices. I'm looking at you guys. Those are easy ones. And this one, car insurance is is an easy one that people don't notice. and they go back and look, well, hey, my car insurance premium was $74 last month and now it's 77. Why? Why did it go up $3? This is really easy for you to use a blank notebook and start tracking those expenses for. So, what I like to do is just list my item. Uh, what are those monthly fixed expenses? And then write out the planned amount. So, for the mortgage, my mortgage is 3406. I know that for a fact. my electricity, natural gas, and water, my utilities. These are things that I can look up right now so that I can start planning accordingly to make sure that my income is going to cover all of those things. I know we pay for one cell phone line. My cell phone line is through Mint Mobile and I get a lot of referral credits so that it takes care of my my bill. By the way, if you're not using Mint, please do. That's always linked below in the description. It's just a no-brainer. An unlimited cell phone data plan for 30 bucks a month. Yeah. Um, this one is for Kyle. So, we'll put that there. Internet, I know is actually zero for us. Uh, because my business pays for it, but if my business didn't pay for it, $70 a month. Netflix is $17 unfortunately. And Disney is 15. So now I can kind of see exactly how much of my income needs to be set aside for the fixed expenses. Keep filling it out. Obviously, your utilities are going to fluctuate from month to month. So just log into your account and see what this month's charges will be. And then when you go to make the the payment, record in the actual column. And then you can also write down your due dates for all of these different bills. I find this really helpful because if you're feeling the pinch midmon and you're like a lot of money went out in the first two weeks of the month, then you can make changes here. Like let's say the car insurance is the second, mortgage is the first, electricity is the 10th. So if you're like, "Wow, I've got a lot of bills going out in the first half of the month." This is where you can ask to make changes. Call up your car insurance company and say, "Hey, can I change the due date from the 2nd to the 17th if they're still getting their money?" I don't think this would be any issue to call up the You just have to call up and ask. Okay, your last one, your last fun exercise is the shop, flop, or bop. Yes. Um, I am a little embarrassing to myself by naming this the way it is, but shop, flop, or bop. Basically, if you like to shop a lot, this is a really fun way to track it. All you have to do is write down the details of each shopping trip after it happens. And then at the end of the month, the same with the restaurant exercise, you're going to write down whether you felt positive, negative, or neutral. And allow some time to pass before you do this part. It gives your brain a chance to come down from the dopamine and assess in a more neutral state of mind. So, if I went out to, let's say, Nordstrom, I bought sandals and let's say they were $55. Then I'm starting to track. Let's say I go out again. I went to Target and I bought tube top, shorts, lipstick, and this all was $45. So, you get the picture. every single time you're going shopping, you're going to write it down into the little grid that you have set up. And then at the end of the month, I'm going to go back and say whether or not this was a flop or a bop. So, let's say I spent $55 on new sandals. And I'm like, you know, they're they're great, but I don't know if I would have spent that much money on it. So, I'd feel a little little neutral about it. Each time you're going to analyze each of your shopping trips to figure out whether you loved it or you're like, "Why did I do that? Why I did not need another tube top? I have like 10 of them." So, this is where I would feel a little negative about it. And then I know exactly where the spending habits are that I want to keep and which spending habits are that I can release. These are things that I can release. And this exercise isn't meant to make you feel bad. It's simply meant to help you create awareness so that you can make better spending decisions that actually reflect what you truly love to spend money on and cut out the rest. So, this is what we're cutting out and we're going to really focus on the shopping that really fills us with fun and ways that we want to spend our money. So, which exercise are you going to try and which one feels realistic for you to stick with? Let me know in the comments if you want to pick up the custom debtfree millennials notebook that has some inspiring images and different messages on here. You can head over to debtfreemillennials.com/merch. I will leave a link to that in the description box below. And I will catch you in the next video. [Music]