Canadian Personal Finance Blog

A useful way to figure out how your future is going to go, is to figure out what you have done in the past. With this in mind, this time of year is a perfect time to take a financial snapshot of what you did this year.

How do I do this? Well, if you use Quicken or Microsoft money, you have the information right at your finger tips, so you don’t have an excuse. Just look at your categories and your monthly spending and figure out where you spent your money.

If you don’t have these tools, find your old bank statements, and your credit card statements (which you should be keeping folks!), and start sifting through this information.

Make up a report for yourself, and make sure you keep it. Read it over figure out what you might be able to change and start formulating your plan (and write that down too). Keep all that so that next year at this time, you can compare how well you did on your plan, and be able to compare your spending from this coming year and the year that just passed (another important tool in your arsenal).

Don’t be afraid, just go ahead and do it, and you might even surprise yourself! –C8j