Last updated on September 14, 2023
There are two exercises that I encourage anyone who desires to begin mastering their money to do.
The first is to track your spending for a month. This should lead to you becoming more pro-active in spending your money on the things that matter most. Here is a worksheet you can download. There are also lots of Google Sheet or Excel templates you can download if you prefer a digital option. After going through the exercise you may decide that one month isn’t enough. I still track mine. It’s something that I’ve done for a long time.
The second is to calculate your net worth. How do you do this? You write down all of your assets in one column, and then you write down all of your liabilities in another column. Add up both columns, and then subtract your liabilities from your assets. The number you come up with is your net worth. Here’s a worksheet you can download.
I’ve discovered in my own life and in the lives of friends that there is one primary reason that we don’t take the time to know our numbers. It’s not busyness. It’s fear. We’re afraid that we won’t like what we see, so we choose to remain ignorant. Yet we know that awareness is the first step of any vision. And that’s why it’s important that we know and understand our numbers, even if at the beginning we don’t like what we see. Once we have awareness, we can now make goals.