The central goal behind this website is to teach a basic, simple system for managing your personal finance.  A system that anyone can implement, and that will make a difference in how you live your life, without the diet effect.  The diet effect, which applies both to money and to eating, is what happens when you try to just cut off all your impulse buys - or comfort food - and then quickly give up when you give into an urge or two.

To that end, I have developed a five step program for money management.  Each step builds on the last, and by the end of the program, you will have an excellent idea of your total financial picture, and a clear path to meeting your goals.

Step 1 - Tracking Your Spending

Before you can set a budget, you need an idea of what you are currently spending.  In this step, we will set up a basic home accounting system.  While I am now an accountant, this is a system that I have been using since I was a teenager, long before I had any formal accounting education.  You don't even have to be good at math - that's why we have computers.

This is the core of managing your money.  If you get no further, learning to track your spending will still help you, by telling you where you might be "leaking" money - spending money without even realizing you're spending it.

Step 2 - Setting a Budget (coming soon)

Budgets don't have to be restrictive, just realistic.  One of the reasons why I suggest tracking your money first, and then setting a budget is that you can actually set your budget to be essentially what you're already spending.  The idea is that by setting the budget, you will be conscious of when you are spending more on something than you used to, and once you are in the habit of checking whether you are meeting your budget or not, you can start confronting where you can cut back, and where you really can't.

Step 3 - Changing your Mindset (coming soon)

Now it's time to stop thinking of your budget a dead weight that's cramping your style, and start thinking of it as the friend that lets you get what you want, just not always when you want it.

Step 4 - Cutting costs (coming soon)

Saving money is a huge topic unto itself, and there will be plenty space on this site dedicated to money saving ideas and strategies.  For the time being, we'll focus on the low hanging fruit - the easiest areas where you can save substantial amounts of money without sacrificing much.

Step 5 - Revisiting the Budget (coming soon)

A good budget needs to be constantly rejigged, sometimes rewritten from scratch.  Now that we have the basics down, we'll take another look at your budget.  The goal here is setting priorities.  When we first looked at budgets, we focussed on starting where you already were, with maybe some adjustments if you were overspending your earnings.  Now that you have a budget conscious mindset, we need to conciously pick priorities, and adjust the budget accordingly.

After completing these five steps, you'll be well on to living a life that makes you happy, even if it's maybe not the life you always dreamed of.