Become your own financial planner! The following is an excerpt from my book Prosperity Planner, a weekly planner with built in income and expense trackers to help you save more money.

Tips for Improving Your Finances

Here are a few tips that have helped me improve my finances. Some I’ve learned from reading the books in the next section, and others I just adopted as I went. I hope you’ll find something in this list that can help you make a difference in your personal finances.

Use cash as much as possible

Limiting your spending to the cash you have in your wallet is a great way to spend less. It forces you to prioritize your spending: Do you want to go out for dinner or have enough gas in the car to make it to work tomorrow?

I have my regular expenses so they automatically come out of my account on the days I’ve noted on my calendar. It took me a bit of trial and error to figure out how much cash I would need to last the two weeks between paydays.

We use cash to pay for groceries, gas for the vehicles, anything the kids might need, and extras that come up like birthday presents or a bottle of wine. Everything else (like our mortgage, vehicle and other loan payments, insurance, and utilities) comes directly out of the bank account. If we don’t have enough cash to make it to payday, the other option is putting the expense on our credit cards which really isn’t an option at all. Try to leave your credit cards at home so you’re not tempted to use them.

I like to hang on to my cash as long as possible and if I have some left by the time the next payday comes around, I treat myself or save it.

Set money aside for annual purchases or large expenses

Annual payments like property taxes and life insurance used to cause me stress because I didn’t plan for those payments. Now I figure out how much I need to set aside every month to cover the annual bill and make sure I do that.

Holidays (vacations and things like Christmas) can also be expensive, so these are other things I try to set money aside for throughout the year so I don’t end up putting expenses on my credit cards. 

Many financial gurus will tell you to put some money aside for emergencies every month. I tried to do this for a long time, but I always ended up using the money to make a loan payment that I had no other way of making, so I don’t do this anymore, but I would like to do it again once I’ve paid off one of my many loans. 

When you do pay off loans (it will happen!) you can funnel the payment you would normally make to another loan or to your savings. You can even funnel half of it to savings and half to another loan.

Look for deals

This will probably sound terrible, but there aren’t a lot of things I pay full price for—grocery staples that never go on sale, that’s about it. When I first had my kids, I was obsessive about coupons, but that became way too time consuming. Sometimes even checking the weekly flyers is too time consuming, so I just remember which stores I get the best deals at and stick to those. 

If extras (like junk food) aren’t on sale, I don’t buy them. This may seem extreme but when you only have a certain amount of cash to get you to the next payday, every bit helps. You can always buy the extras if you have cash left on the next payday. 

Sell your junk

This one might seem a bit out there too, but we once had a garage sale that made over $900. We didn’t have a lot of big-ticket items either, just a lot of stuff we weren’t using anymore. The bonus of selling your junk is you get to free up some space too.

Having a garage sale can be a lot of work, so snap a few pictures and put your stuff on a buy and sell site or Facebook group especially for people in your area if hosting a garage sale sounds like too much work.

Get creative

Sometimes money shows up in surprising ways. This is where your list of ways to make more money comes in handy. Do you have a special talent you could start charging for? I have a creative friend who sold her knitted scarves on the side. She enjoyed making them and found a shop that let her sell them on commission. 

Sometimes, you have to get out there and see where the opportunities are. This can be hard, but being in debt forever will be much harder.

See a walkthrough of the planner below.