Walk a Fine Line
The final day of the 31 Days to a Better Bank Balance series is literally about balance — not just about your bank balance, but about keeping things in balance in your financial life.
Let me first say that I’m a big fan of the power of focus. When you really, REALLY focus on one aspect of your financial life and give it everything you’ve got, you make major progress. This is especially the case with things like debt reduction and increasing your income. And that’s good. In fact, it’s great.
But you can’t spend your entire life focused on just one thing.
You need balance too.
Balance can be achieved by rotating through each of the major areas of personal finance on a regular basis, or by focusing like crazy for a short period on making great strides in just one area, while maintaining the other areas.
So the final challenge for today is to look back over the steps in the series and choose one of the areas that you may have glossed over. (We’ve talked debt reduction, reducing spending in various areas, increasing your income, giving, creating a spending plan, etc.)
Give that area another shot by spending more time on it until you’ve made enough progress. Then set up a schedule for yourself to check in regularly on all of the major areas of your financial life.
While you’re at it, remember to walk a fine line in your daily life too.
Some days it’s fine to splurge, or to go to bed without paying the bills you meant to pay that particular day. But there’s a difference between the occasional exception and a whole slew of them. When you splurge on ice cream for your kids everyday, it becomes ordinary and unappreciated. When you slack every day, you get nowhere (at best) and go backwards (at worst).
So keep things in balance, and watch your bank balance improve in the process.