I’ve made a lot of financial mistakes over the years – some obvious, some not so much. If I’ve learned anything, though, it’s that the mistakes you make yesterday do not define you today.
Every single day is a new day, a day in which you can fix your bad habits and work to right the wrongs of your past.
This article is a long list of some of the many personal finance mistakes I’ve made in my life, along with notes on what I did to turn those mistakes around.
SEE ALSO: Now that I'm out of debt, here are 6 misguided beliefs I no longer have about money
Mistake #1: I never knew where all of my money was going.
Whenever I looked at my checking account balance, I’d have some idea in my head of how much money should be left, and there was always less there than I expected. It seemed like money just evaporated and I really didn’t have any idea where it went. I’d assume that I must have used it for something worthwhile that I had forgotten about, and if I looked through the actual list of withdrawals, it never seemed wrong. It just never made sense.
I needed to overcome this mistake because it meant that my spending was literally out of control. I truly did not know where all of the money was going, and that made it very hard to step back and see where I was making spending mistakes. It also made it impossible to see where things like identity theft were occurring.
How did I fix it? I started keeping a detailed spending log using an old spiral-bound Mead pocket notebook. Whenever I spent any money at all, I wrote down that expense in that pocket notebook, explaining exactly what I bought. I also saved every single receipt that I received.
Then, every few days, I went through those receipts and recorded them in my personal finance program of choice (which, at the time, was Microsoft Money, which is now defunct). Over time, I began to realize the truth: I was wasting a lot of money on small, unnecessary, completely forgettable things.
Mistake #2: I didn’t save adequately for retirement at the start of my career.
Don’t get me wrong – I did save a little. The person I trusted most at the time for career and life advice basically demanded that I do so. However, instead of looking at it as something really useful for my future, I looked at it merely as something to check off my to-do list.
I ended up contributing about as little as I possibly could. My first employer did offer some nice matching funds, but I only scooped up some of those matching funds because I contributed so little.
A much better move would have been to contribute a lot to retirement, which is essentially what I’m doing right now. I wish I had contributed 10% of my income at a minimum, and perhaps as much as 20%. If that were the case, I’d be doing great right now. I ended up spending money that should have been saved for retirement on the stupid stuff I discovered with that first mistake.
The truth is that when you contribute more to a retirement plan, the only thing you actually “cut” from your spending are the dumbest and most useless expenses, which aren’t really much of a loss in terms of your quality of life.
Mistake #3: Sarah and I had a food budget that approached $1,000 a month for just the two of us.
How is that possible? Well, we ate out several times a week, and at least a couple of those meals were at very nice restaurants. We never ordered a meal without drinks, either. I often went out to lunch with coworkers, and Sarah did so on occasion (her job wasn’t as prone to lunching with coworkers as mine was). When we did prepare food at home, it was usually either convenience food or loaded down with expensive ingredients. We always had purchased beverages in the fridge, too, and we usually had a few bottles of wine on hand as well.
This added up to monthly food-related spending that often approached $1,000, believe it or not. That’s a lot of money, especially for two people.
So, how did we fix it? First of all, we started to realize that by eating out so often, we really didn’t appreciate it any more. These expensive meals were kind of the norm and not anything special. Not only that, many of the meals we ordered there were pretty simple things that we could prepare at home. It turned out that our biggest obstacle to preparing more foods at home was our lack of confidence in the kitchen, so we simply tried making more things at home – and more challenging things, too.
We also figured out pretty quickly that many of the expensive ingredients we were buying were largely unnecessary. They were either solely for a small moment of convenience or were minor elements. We scaled back and started using more produce, dried beans and rice, spices, and other elements in our dishes. We cut out most of the soda and alcohol, switching to water as our primary beverage. The end result? Our food expenses dropped through the floor. We now spend barely half as much as we spent back then and we’re now a family of five.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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