Take Control of Your Finances: PocketSmith Part 1
Dec 30, 2018
Happy New Year to all of the wonderful people who enjoy reading my blog!
I truly hope that 2019 will be a fantastic year for you and I’m excited about helping you sort out your personal finance questions along the way. Yep, the three words EXCITED, PERSONAL and FINANCE do belong in the same sentence!
Generally, at this time of year, we do start to think about what the next year will bring and many of us even sit down and set goals. Not me so much (although in 2018 I did decide to do ten press-ups every day and have more or less stuck to it. Random huh?) In December I’ve had many emails saying something along the lines of:
“Right! I have had it, I’m taking charge of my finances starting in 2019”! Please help me!
And with this being the time of year that so many of us take an extended break from work I don’t see traffic to The Happy Saver decrease, it actually increases because you have time to actually sit down, read, learn and put some concrete plans for your money in place.
As I blog I always try to give you useful websites and tools to use and often they are the ones that I use myself. Well, this blog post has come a little prematurely because I have been using personal finance software site PocketSmith for over a month now and have been taking notes as I go so that I could blog about it and review it sometime in January. I’m not quite ready to review it yet BUT they got in touch and pointed out what I just described above, that at this time of year, many people take the time to look at their money and make some changes and they are looking for tools to help them do this. They have provided me with a discount code so you can try PocketSmith for a couple of months at a discounted rate.
Finding the budgeting and tracking tool that is right for YOU is a hard ask. Personal finance is deeply personal, and everyone goes about it slightly differently but the key to those who succeed and get ahead is working out exactly where their money is. Whenever people email me with their situation one of the first tips I will offer them is to track their financial activity - something that either bores them silly or freaks them out. But seriously, only when you do this in some form or other can you make the right changes and start to understand where all of your money is going. Back in April I blogged about tracking every cent. If you haven’t read this post you can check it out here: Tracking every cent...
Although its early days for me using PocketSmith, I have seen enough to know that I like it and that its extremely comprehensive and effective for tracking my earning, spending and saving. After the initial setup, it is the most automated system I have used so far. So for those of you who only manage to manually input their expenses for a fortnight before quitting, you will like this software! It does it for you because it automatically brings in your banking feed. Every single transaction! You can create your own budgets, forecast your spending (so that Christmas won’t come as a big surprise ever again), you can easily see how much you save and how much you spend. It really is very clever. Oh, and it’s a New Zealand business too and I like supporting NZ.
SO, below is PocketSmith’s New Year’s Promo where you can get 50% off the first two months of their Premium plan. This is an excellent length of time to decide if it's for you or not.
I also want to make it clear that I’m providing an affiliate link, which means that if you do sign up using my link I will receive a very small percentage of any transaction.
Once you are signed up and using it, let me know your thoughts, I would love to hear your comments and I can add it to my upcoming PocketSmith Part 2 post…
Happy Saving!
Ruth
Take it away PocketSmith…
One small change can save you money in 2019
#SmallChangeBigGains
Setting big financial goals, like getting out of debt or saving for a home, can be daunting. But what if you usher in 2019 by focusing on one small change that could result in big gains financially?
Start by picking one thing you’d like to spend less on.
Then, take a moment to be curious about the reasons for the desire to change your spending habit. Do you think your curiosity will help you be more successful in making your one small change? Rather than if it was a New Year’s resolution?
The answer to the latter is yes, and we’ll explain why below. In the meantime, here are some examples of small changes that yield big differences over a year:
What does curiosity have to do with change?
While change can be hard, curiosity - according to top mindfulness researcher Dr. Judson Brewer - feels good. So to effectively change a habit, you should enjoy the process by being curious about why this habit exists.
In his TED talk, Dr. Brewer suggests that you first observe yourself acting on the impulse to do the thing you want to change, then get curious! Ask yourself:
How does it feel?
What triggered the impulse?
What satisfaction does it provide?
And for how long?
How can we apply mindfulness to changing financial habits and saving money?
If you’ve identified an area in which you believe you’re overspending, you’re already most of the way there because you don’t need to justify the need for change.
Take late fees as an example. Step back and be curious about why your habitual routines cause payments to be late, and penalties to occur. From there, take achievable steps to fix that one habit - perhaps by scheduling their payments when they arrive.
And there’s your small change.
Conventional wisdom tells us that if we want to achieve a goal we must try harder and work harder, but perhaps we can make those New Year’s resolutions stick by trying softer!
Let’s get started!
Track your spending and monitor progress on your small change with PocketSmith, one of the sharpest money management tools on the Internet.
If you sign up for PocketSmith from here, you will get half price on the first two months of PocketSmith Premium. Plus you’ll receive an email guide designed to help you track and make your #SmallChangeBigGains
- PocketSmith
