Ideas To Challenge Yourself To Achieve Your Financial Goals! | Clever Girl Finance

so what financial goals are you trying to achieve are you focused on saving an emergency fund or paying off debt or another Financial goal and how are you keeping yourself motivated or challenged to achieve your goals keep watching I'm going to be sharing some ideas to keep yourself challenged to achieve your financial goals hey everyone my name is Bola shokun I'm the founder and CEO of clever girl Finance I'm also the author of The clever girl Finance book series and my most recent book choosing to prosper welcome to clever girl Finance TV so in today's video I'm going to be sharing 12 ideas to help you stay motivated and challenged to achieving your financial goals let's Jump Right In number one attempt to max out a retirement savings account so do you currently contribute to a 401k or 403b do you have your own Roth or a traditional IRA you want to look at your um accounts and determine how much or what percent of your income you're currently contributing to them and see how much you could be adding onto those accounts in order to max out based on uh whatever that annual contribution limit is if you're not already maxing out one way that you can attempt to do this after you have taken a look at your current expenses is to try to increase your contributions by 1% every month every quarter or every 6 months and this allows you to gradually increase your contributions without impact in your uh day-to-day expenses too much because you just have a little bit of money being taken away each time so consider putting 1% of your income an additional 1% of your income towards your retirement savings each month each quarter or each 6 months until you get to the point where you're maxing out your retirement savings accounts number two go on a no spend challenge so one way to save more money uh that you can put towards emergency savings paying off DE or investing is to find ways to save and a no spend challenge is a great way to just save money that you don't spend and essentially what it entails is you set a period of time 30 days 60 days 90 days even a year where you're not spending any money on anything that is not essential um there are tons of videos on of YouTube es on YouTube here especially at the beginning of the year of people who are participating in low buy and no buy challenges and so in no spend or a no buy challenge is a great way to save extra money that you can put towards your financial goals number three learn a new Financial term and this really ties into just really educating yourself more about how money works when you are able to learn more about how money works by learning financial terms of financial Concepts you're able to save more money because the more you know the more empowered you are with knowledge around your finances the more insights and ideas you have as to how you can can better save number four learn a skill that you would usually Outsource so while Outsourcing tasks can be helpful if you're able to do them yourself that is money you can save and put towards your financial goals so think about things that you would typically Outsource and attempt to do them by yourself to try to save some money for example it could be paying someone to put Furniture together uh paying to get your nails done paying to get your hair done web design or social media management that you pay for for your business take a look at these different things that you're Outsourcing and determine which of these things can I do on my own by myself even if it's just temporarily so that you can save some extra money towards your financial goals number five try a cashon budget or a cash only uh approach for part of your budget this means paying with cash into of your debit or your credit card there are a lot of studies that show that when you actually have to hand over the physical cash you spend less money and this is a great way to be able to put the money you don't you don't spend towards your financial goals uh you can use a cash envelope approach where you put the money for different categories and different envelopes and you use that to make the different payments uh for part or all of your budget it's important however that you keep those envelopes safe so you don't lose that money number six try a minimalism Challenge and minimalism is all about learning to live on less and when you are focused on minimalism one of the things that you do is you declutter and so you can declutter items in your home your kitchen your closets your uh your garage and sell those items and focus on living on less and then the money that you save from those sales and also from not buying things that you don't need as you focus on living on less is money you can put towards your financial goals by the way if you're enjoying this video I'd love for you to hit the like button subscribe to this channel tell your best girlfriends about clevergirl finance and then stop by our website at clgo finance.com we have over 30 plus completely free courses over 40 plus completely free worksheets and I would love for you to check out the clever girls no podcast you can find this podcast everywhere it listen to your podcast episodes okay let's get back to this video number seven complete a task on a fixed budget so let's say you have a task that you need to complete for example decorating a room in your house focus on creating a fixed budget for this task and challenge yourself to keep yourself under budget and see how much under budget you can keep yourself and this is going to force you to really lay out exactly what you need to spend uh look for deals and coupons on items you want to buy for that room and then plan your time and what you can do on your own accordingly in order to save money this is a great way to challenge yourself to save money and then the money you don't spend within your budget you can put towards your financial goals number eight rewrite your money script and so your money script is essentially what you tell yourself that you believe about money and so if you find yourself constantly focusing on the negatives about the lack what you don't have what you haven't been able to achieve you're actually building a negative money mindset so you can rewrite your money script and focus on the positives focus on gratitude focus on abund abundance focus on what you've accomplished focus on what you want to accomplish and having this new and re refreshed money mindset can help with your focus and your motivation as you work towards your goals number nine keep a consumerism Journal this is also known as a spending journal and essentially what you're going to do is write down every time you spend money and be aware of what you're spending money on that's the whole point of this journal so you want to review it each time you write something down maybe at the end of the night and just see where is your money going and this can help you adjust habits adjust spending habits that you have that you want t