- Culture of dreaming in your home
In order to use money as a tool to make a life you love and feel happy, you need to be comfortable with it to create many more great ideas. You may need to sit down to figure out what we gonna be in the next 2 years, 4 years, 6 years or even futher.
List down to see what our plan gonna be and how we can do to make it come true? Ideas come with actions is the right way of the culture of dreaming. This causes us motivation and inspiration to make our targets come true.
Regarding the lives of couples, you and your spouse need to align to have a plan together, to buy a house, a car or something that related to both of your life. It is important to have another one understand what you are doing and receive their support in the meantime. Example, don’t complain when your wife buy 500$ clothes and you thought it’s so expensive. Both are not on the same page.
- Tracking budget
Most people start their budget the way too aggressively. They change a bunch of stuff such as we’re not gonna go out to eat, we’re cut back on groceries, they do all things they can in the hard-core way they don’t always stick with it.
It looks like we are in an intense extreme diet that we force ourselves to do things that we don’t really want to do. But I though this is an initial great way to control yourself in the first time that to help you on the right track. You can start doing it for a month or two months to see what you’re currently doing. Is it good or bad? You may gonna have an overall picture and clarity on what that future dream is? Once everything is gonna settled down well, you can adjust your tracking budget accordingly and feel comfortable with it.
- Asking yourself a question
Now we know what our dream is, we know what that clarity is; we have a tracking budget now. How we’re using our money actually going to help us to achieve that dream. It may not be great now, but at least we can see what changes they gonna be, then we can adjust accordingly at many other times.
We should have a proactive mindset on what we’re doing. Although we change lots of things, cut back lots of expenses, not going out for eating, reduce budget of clothes, but we happily accept it. Once we have a ready mindset, it is easier for us to go ahead and experience things and change. It is your choice, not other’s choice.
- How do we track the budget? Which tool?
If you start doing the tracking, I highly recommend you guys to start with mint.com. It’s super simple for all starters and just take you guys not until 20 or 10 minutes for the setup. We can just let it run automatically for a month or so, and then it does not take you lots of efforts and hard work to follow every day. And it’s also free for you to try starting and you don’t lose any money at all.
Although mint.com has lots of advantages, but the disadvantage it brings us is the third step of the setting process which is the proactive budgeting piece. It’s not really proactive budgeting.
- How can people start thinking outside of the box?
There are not too many people in our daily life, especially surrounding us really cause inspiration and motivation for everyone to have a better action in financial area. But mostly they come from the Internet. All good materials you can find are mostly coming from the Internet. I though it’s quite easy to understand that there are not too many people have available amazing knowledge. Most of them just have conventional mindset and always stick with it.
And the second matter is that each situation has different story, and you should find the right people which have your same situation and story. If you are a single mom with two kids, it does not really make sense for you to find stories and inspirations from moms who have their husband to support with their fulltime job. It’s totally different. It’s just one of the examples.
- What are those common obstacles that people usually face with?
One of the first obstacles is that people cannot find the same situations that they can get advice from. For example, they have kids and problems with kids but they cannot really find materials, helps or inspirations from the Internet or from their close friends.
Another example is that they feel too bad about their situations. The stories are always amazing from Internet sources and they feel disappointed about them. That thought is actually weird as it’s opposite and we cannot compare in that way. So please stay flexibly to figure out materials on the Internet, do not feel bad when something does not turn into the way we expect. Life is also complicated; please do make it more complex. Life is short so live it with full of happiness and financial freedom.