How Can Your Wallet Be The Best Tool for Effective Budgeting?

The Costanza Wallet (Photo credit: shareski)

Do you know your wallet can be a big player in tracking your expenses? If you have a disorganized wallet, it becomes very difficult for you to monitor your spending. If you have a number of useless receipts, cards and other stuff in your wallet, you will always face problems when you need something urgently. There are many disadvantages of keeping overstuffed and disorganized wallet. You may let several coupons expire because of a bad system. There are many smart ways, wise people implement on their wallet to stay on the budget; today, we will share those to make you more efficient in budgeting:

1. Re-visit and Clean Your Wallet Regularly:

If you want to find essential things quickly and easily, you must clean up your wallet regularly. People having this habit never miss their important rebates, coupons, and sales, which means they have more money to spend on other important things. 

2. Limit the Plastic Choices to One or Two:

It is really difficult to keep a complete check over multiple debit and credit cards. You should have complete information about the balance on your cards, transactions and other statements. It’s wise to minimize the number of plastics in your wallet by putting only one or two cards that you use regularly. This practice is good to keep yourself in budget because this helps you limiting your unnecessary needs.

3. Keep Paper Receipts Out; Use Mobile App Instead:

Paper receipts and lists of unnecessary things are so annoying and they mess up your wallet too. In today’s technology era, there are lots of phone apps that note down receipt data and save you from the paper waste. Think about using popular apps, like Shoeboxed, Lemon, etc, and capture the photos of receipts and save it in your cell phone. 

4. Keep An Image Of Goal to Keep You Up:

We all find it difficult to stick to our budget and control our spending as it takes lot of strength and willpower. You can give yourself a boost by placing picture of your goal in your wallet. This will remind you about the goal you have set, and help you keeping yourself from any unnecessary purchase.

5. Buy High-Quality, Toughest Wallet:

It is necessary to have a good quality wallet, if you really want to keep the things properly organized. It is really difficult to locate cash and receipts on a worn wallet. Having a good quality wallet means, you are quick in finding anything you want. So, buy a quality, toughest wallet as it saves your time and money because it will be your partner for a long time.

6. Streamline Your Payment Processes:

Many people use credit and debit cards, whereas the rest prefer cash. So, if you are a card user or your prefer cash, stick to one system only. This would help you tracking your expenses in a simple way. You won’t commit mistakes if you are less confused. . This tip benefits those with families, where everybody can use the same payment method.
Conclusion:

If you commit to implement all the above mentioned wallet hacks, I ensure you will enjoy using this tool for keeping track of your spending. Nowadays, there are several virtual wallets in the market as well, that allow you making many transactions and payments using your smartphone; you should try using them as well. These tips are simple to implement, but have proven to give awesome results in improving day-to-day financial life.

Author’s Bio:

John Collinsmith is a senior writer and journalist for poor credit loan, a consumers guide to mastering money and saving. You can save more money by checking out the compound saving calculator and other money saving calculators.

Reach Your Retirement Goals Faster Playing The Budget Game!

Throughout our entire lives, we dream of financial freedom. We think of what it will be like to retire and finally be able to do the things that we enjoy full time! So, we work and work and save and save hoping to reach a retirement goal that we set years back. But, wouldn't it be great to reach those goals faster than you thought simply by getting competitive with yourself? Well, you can!

Recently, I got bored with budgeting. I mean, really bored! So much so that I stopped keeping track all together. Oh boy, was that a great idea or what? A couple of months flew by as they always do and, I started to realize, I wasn't saving any money or making much of a dent in the debt I was working so hard to pay off! It should come as no surprise that I quickly updated my budget and took a look at my bank statement to see where all the money was going. Small purchases were killing my retirement plan because they weren't being made in moderation with the help of a budget.

Now, there is no one on this planet that doesn't like budgeting as much as me so, if it is one of your least favorite things to do, join the club! What came as a shock to me is, there are overwhelming amounts of people out there that feel the same way I do about budgeting. I found that out as I sifted through several different personal finance websites around the web. 

After reading up on ways to make the process fun, I came to the conclusion that none of the approaches I'd found would work for me. Why? Well, they were all great but, I'm a competitive person! I like to play games, keep score and of course, WIN! So, I figured, why not try and turn my budget into a game. In the game, every dollar would signify a point and there would be set barriers to break. 

I started by cleaning up my budget spreadsheet. Once I did, I totaled up my debt goals and savings goals. I had to do at least this much to get a positive score. For every dollar I spent that went over my goals for that month, I would give myself a point. Month by month, I started to track my progress. 

In the first month, I ended up with a negative score which, well, frustrated me. But, I didn't reach my goals and now, I was being told I didn't by a score board! So, I did some tweaking. I looked at where my money was going and made some changes to how it was being spent. The next month, I scored 11 points! Which was not much considering I had a 219 point dent to cover from the month before.

So, I worked and worked, tweaking little spending habits and eventually, I got the high score of 376 points! I'm still working to beat it but, what that means is $376 more than my goals made it to pay off my debts or pad my savings a bit in one month! That's great considering I have pretty aggressive goals! That being said, I'm going to challenge you to start playing the budget game. All the instructions for how to set up your score board and play the budget game are available in my recent article, How To Make Budgeting More Fun. 

About The Author – Joshua Rodriguez
This article was written by Joshua Rodriguez, proud owner and founder of CNA Finance and avid personal finance journalist. Join the conversation with Joshua on Google+!