This week I have been working on my personal finances.

Personal finance is a topic I haven’t spent much time on, and I haven’t spoken about much.

Most of what I know about personal finance I have learned from books, business, and making mistakes.

For the most part I feel fortunate with my current circumstances, but the ambition within me causes me to rarely stay satisfied for long.

I‘ve noticed myself fall into a common trap: lifestyle creep. As one earns more over the years, it’s easy for spend to increase in line with any increase in earnings.

I don’t think I’m extreme here — I am not buying yachts, or even cars, but it’s all relative. A rare treats becomes a regular treat. Which becomes a habit. Which becomes hard to remove from your life. In my reflections this week I could see several instances of treats that had become hard-to-remove habits. It was a wake-up call.

Learning to budget

I’ve never been very good at budgeting, but I thought a good place to start would be to adopt a simple high level goal: spend less than I make.

Spend less than I make.

That sounds pretty simple, right?!

Except… in today’s world, I haven’t found this easy at all — to even know how much you are spending is hard.

There is so much to juggle and understand: get a credit card, get a current account, get a joint account with a partner, get a savings account, pay a mortgage / rent, pay recurring payments, bills, subscriptions, direct debits, transfers, donate to charity, pay tax, and maybe even go on holiday and spend money in a different currency once in a while.

Even with great tools to track my spending (I’m a huge fan of Monzo here in the UK), I still find it hard to truly know what I’m spending during a month.

Not only have I found it difficult to understand and get a baseline of my spending, but I have also found life getting more expensive. “Inflation” has been mentioned a lot in the UK news cycle for as long as I can remember, but I never fully understood its implications.

Taking action on my spending

I won’t bore you with everything I‘ve learned, but I will jump to a few realisations and actions and I have taken since drawing my attention to my finances more intently:

• Plan my meals at the weekend for the week ahead.
• Don’t get a coffee out every morning. Make one at home and bring it on my dog walk.
• Make avoiding spending fun — set a budget goal for the month in Monzo and try to stick to it.
• Buy good quality ingredients at local shops on Saturdays. Combine this with a meal plan and I have no excuse for getting a takeaway mid-week.
• Question everything I spend on. Do I need to eat there? Drink then?