Jack Wang and Pennywise Coaching break down the first step to better money habits: know exactly what you earn, owe, and spend each month. Write it all down. Most people skip this because of shame, but looking at the numbers is how you stop avoiding and start planning.
Chapters
What are some basic steps or a couple, you know, a step or two that people should take if they want to start down this path of being better with their money and much more intentional? What are, what are some sort of basic tips that you can share?
Well, I think first of all, you have to be aware of your situation. If you don't really know what you make or what you owe or what you're paying in interest or you know, what you could be earning in interest. If you have no clue about that stuff, then you really aren't positioned to make any changes. You don't know what your expenses are. How much do you spend on eating out? How much are you spending on your cell phone bill or whatever? It's really hard to make changes if you, if you aren't even aware of where you're starting. You know, how do you know you're going to get there if you don't even know where you started? So I think that that would be the number one thing is to just start putting it all in one place. Writing it down, being kind of getting in touch with it. I think a lot of people avoid it because it feels uncomfortable. And there's a lot of shame and embarrassment to— oh, I don't really want to look at my number because 99% of time when I ask people how much debt they have, they, they don't really know. And they haven't looked at it. They don't even open statements anymore. They do everything paperless. And so they're not checking in, they're not signing in to look at that stuff. So I just encourage people to just look at it. You know, I always tell people, you know, the monster in the closet is a whole lot less scary when you turn the light on, when you can just see them, right? And let's just look, because then we can make a plan for how to change things. So I think that's one of the first things.
