Day 30 Of 30 Days Of Stay-At-Home Personal Finance Wins: Create A Personal Finance Calendar

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What if you were able to come out of this time of social distancing and economic crisis with a stronger and healthier financial life? What if you looked at this as an opportunity to take a little bit of your extra time each day to work on your finances?

Since it takes me about 35 minutes to drive to work in the morning and 45 minutes on the way back home, I have an extra 1 hour and 20 minutes of my day that I don’t have to drive while I’m working from home that I can use to accomplish something. This doesn’t even take into consideration all of the networking and social events that would usually take up some of my time throughout the week.

Obviously, your situation is different than mine (and probably a whole lot different if you have kids at home who would otherwise be in daycare), but I’m guessing that we all have at least a little extra time right now that we can dedicate to our personal finances.

It looks like we’re going to continue to practice our social distancing skills at least through April, and now is a great time to work on creating a better financial situation, so I’m giving you 30 days of stay-at-home personal finance wins throughout April.

Unfortunately, I understand that there are many who have (and who will) lose their jobs during this time of uncertainty and objectively will not come out on the other side of this with a stronger financial situation. Hopefully, many of these personal finance wins can help to lessen the blow and make things easier on them. On the other hand, I think that many of these wins are still relevant to those who are fortunate enough to be in a position to not have to worry about their job and their finances to help them build a healthier financial life.

Day 30: Create A Personal Finance Calendar

If you’ve been following along and taking action, then you’ve accomplished a ton of great things over the past 30 days to strengthen your personal finances. However, that doesn’t mean that your work is done. A lot of the wins in this series need to be completed regularly to benefit you the most.

Reviewing your spending habits, planning for big expenses, working through a debt pay down strategy, increasing your retirement account contributions, reviewing your credit report, reviewing your insurance policies, following your budget and spending tracking system, updating your net worth statement, tracking progress towards your financial goals, and having a money meeting or money date are all things that you should be doing on an ongoing basis. This is where having a personal finance calendar in place can help.

Your personal finance calendar can look however it needs to so that it works well for you. Mine is having reminders in the calendar app on my phone that tell me when I need to knock out each task but yours could be a paper calendar on your desk with tasks written in the days that you need to accomplish them or time blocked out on your digital calendar to knock them out.

Whatever it looks like for you, take some time this week to put the work in up front so that you don’t have to think about when you need to worry about these things again and so that you’ll be more likely to accomplish them once the time comes.