With holidays coming so close, it’s really difficult to get ahold of yourself and not to spend all your money on Christmas and New Year. Making presents and throwing massive parties is a really pleasant thing to do, but you have to have some means to live afterwards. Check out some of our money management tips, that will allow you to survive the holidays and save your financial abilities. Achieve success with JiJi!
Find Your Motivation
It will be difficult for you to start to seriously think about your money management if you don’t really have a reason for it. This may lead to too many slips in judgement and compromises with your consciousness. Either you are in debt or just want to save up for some grand event in your life, you will feel that these advices are more reasonable and justified.
Collect the data
First of all, you need to gather all the information you can on you own expenses. Write down every item you buy or pay for, its price, categorize them, do the same for every source of your income. This may be a pretty boring and painstaking task, but there are a lot of apps for iPhone and Android, that might help you with that.
Keep doing the monitoring for at least few weeks to fully realize all your habits and an actual number of things you need for living.
Categorize
Divide your expenses into categories, this way it will be much easier for you to analyze them. You can include categories such as rent, bills, food, fun, education etc. Try making the categories as particular as possible, this will simplify the further analysis.
Analyze
Try to review every category you’ve establish and evaluate it on account of its importance. Some of them are obviously mandatory, like rent or bills. For all the others, try to determine whether you are ok with an amount of money you spend on a particular category. If not, try to find cheaper alternatives (for example, buy used products or products from real people on Jiji). You may even fully erase some categories from your list for a radical change.
Plan
Plan your expenses in advance, from small details to major stuff. Try to leave no place for the unexpected expenses, but still have some amount of money held over for that. Keep your attention at small expenses, as they are often the thing, that gets out of control. We always keep everything planned out, if we are preparing for some major expenses, but it is really easy to allow something small to slip out of control a few times.
Maybe this tips won’t really help you on this holidays, but in the long run they must prove themselves useful. To start saving up right now, buy presents for your loved ones on Jiji!
