EP: 008 New Year Money Makeover: A Step by Step Guide to Organizing Your Finances in 2024 and Beyond
If you have made improving your finances a top priority for 2024 watch this video. I share specific steps to organizing your finances and building health financial habits.
For the first episode of Modern Financial Wellness in 2024, I put together a short "How to Video". I'll walk you through the things to think about and steps to take when you consider organizing your finances.
We'll start with some high-level ideas like:
- Creating a "Year End Review" for 2023. Because you can't move forward without thinking about where you have been.
- Having an "Open Growth Mindset". I reference Carol Dweck's book "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" which tells us that anything you practice, you can get better at. To me this directly applies to managing your finances. Especially if managing your money is difficult or stressful. Don't worry, that's totally normal. If you practice you will get better! And it will feel less stressful over time!
Once you've thought about the past year and prepared yourself mentally to tackle your finances today, I walk you through 3 important areas to focus your efforts:
1) Getting Organized.
2) Understanding where your money is coming from and where you are spending it.
3) Building good processes and routines for cultivating healthy financial habits you can stick with.
Any time I'm talking about building new habits and routines I always recommend James Clear's book, "Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results". It's really a must read for anyone looking to build a new habit or behavior. If you are kicking off a new routine with your money, then this book should be on the top of your reading/listening list.
I spotlight a few different Tools, Apps and FinTech Platforms that can help make your financial lives easier, give you great visibility into your financial situation and generally lower the stress and anxiety around managing your money. Here are a few:
- Copilot - Financial Dashboard & Cash Flow App
- Personal Capital (now Empower) - Planning software with dashboards and reporting
- Rocket Money - Mobile friendly cash flow tracking app
- Quicken - Planning software with dashboards and reporting
- TillerHQ - For tracking cash flow, if you LOVE spreadsheets
- Sequence - The first of it's kind financial router to help you move money across your plan. If you haven't listened to or seen it yet, check out the conversation I had w/ Sequence CEO Gilad Uziely HERE.
Along the way I also share lessons learned from prior episodes including:
- EP:001 Mindfulness & Money w/ Derek Hagen - The importance of being "Non-Judgmentally Aware" of our spending and habits.
- EP: 003 Getting Things Done w/ Dr. Moira Somers and Shaun Erikson - We're human, managing money is hard. Give yourself a break and stick with it!
- EP: 005 Time & Money w/ Time Management Expert Dr. Sarah Reiff-Hekking - The importance of having an open growth mindset.
Finally as always I try I talk about how my wife and I manage the day to day of our finances and what some of our routines look like, as well as anecdotes from client experiences and much more.
Best of luck with your financial goals for 2024 and beyond! I am here to help if you need me.
And remember if you ever want to chat about anything from the episode or have questions about how these things might apply to you, please feel free to virtually drop by my office sometime using the link below. I'm always happy to connect and help out where I can...
