Your budget can help you keep your New Year’s goals in sight by giving you extra motivation to reach your goal by seeing the dollar value involved with each goal. This is best achieved by using CalendarBudget since it shows you exactly where all of your money is going, but any budget will help somewhat.

Some different areas where knowing the dollar value can help motivate you to reach your goal:

  • trying to quit a habit (like smoking, drinking, overeating, or impulse buying)
    • for smoking… if someone smokes half a pack a day and a pack costs $5, they can save $913 per year, or if they smoke a pack a day, they can save $1,825
    • take the money you would have used for these habits and use that savings to reward yourself with one of the items on your wish list, or use a portion for that and put the rest towards your bills/debt to be debt free sooner
  • planning to make a major purchase (a new car, a nice vacation, a new home)
  1. I enter the major purchase on the day I want to achieve it and see how much it puts me in the red for that day.
  2. Go back month by month to the current day and remove any unnecessary purchases or insert any additional income you can have (maybe a 2nd job or overtime you can ask for).
  3. Adjust your budget to the new numbers that you have changed your spending/additional income to. For example, I budgeted $500/month for groceries, but feel I can save an additional $10/week on my grocery bill by not buying the expensive cereals, but going for the cheaper brands, plus I can remove my dinner out each Friday that I had budgeted $50 for. That would give me a savings of $240/month. So I would go into my categories set up and adjust my monthly food budget from $700 to $460. Over a 4 month period, that would add up to $960 of savings, which would put a big dent in the amount that I need to save for my big purchase.
  4. I then go back and see when I would reach the target amount for my goal, making any additional adjustments to expenses where needed.