I hope you all had an amazing Christmas!
We had a lovely day yesterday and I’ve woken up this morning feeling refreshed and happy after the lovely relaxing day we had yesterday. Christmas doesn’t always live up to expectations with excited children and tired parents but I have to say that yesterday was great and we all really enjoyed our day.
Now that it’s over, I’m sat eyeing up the Christma tree trying to decide how soon is too soon to take it down and I know you’re all going to tell me it’s much too soon but I’m literally having to sit on my hands to stop me from packing everything away.
I’m the same every year though, I love Christmas and everything to do with it but as soon as it’s over I just want to move on. I want to start planning for New Year and making my New Year’s Resolutions and setting my word of the year for the following year.
Tell me I’m not the only one?
The start of a New Year is always like opening a notebook on the first page to me and I want to fill it with so many good things! I’m not going to lie though, I certainly don’t stick to all of my resolutions – some things I lose interest or don’t end up sticking to in for one reason or another but some of my resolutions I really work on and not only do I stick to them but they become a habit that makes my life better in one way or another.
One of my resolutions for 2017 is to be better with money because I feel like I’ve let things slip in the last six months with me being unwell. I could say the same for lots of aspects of my life this year but none of those such an effect on us as a family as being more financially clever.
Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t gone ridiculously off the rails but I do feel that I’ve lost control a little bit and I want that control back because I know that when we’re on top of everything, we have spare money to do all sorts with the kids and when we’re not, we don’t. It’s as simple as that.
There are lots of areas I want to get better with next year, the first one being my meal planning which is one thing I always recommend anyone who wants to save money does but I can count the number of times that we’ve successfully stuck to a meal plan since July on two hands. Having to rely on Mr Frugal to do the shopping has seriously impacted our food budget and being unable to cook as much as I’d like has meant that the things I’ve been buying have been different (and more expensive) too. That’s all going to change in January when I go back to work and I can’t wait.
Another thing that we need to look at is our savings goals because we’ve dipped into what we did have (which wasn’t much) and we need to replace what we’ve used and increase our savings massively next year.
To help me with my getting better with money resolution, I started to make myself a financial planner that I could print out and use to help me keep a track of my budget and how I was doing throughout the year. Mid way through making my own financial planner, it occurred to me that it might help other people to so I enlisted the help of a technical friend and am pleased to be able to share with you my 2017 Financial Planner.
It’s a printable document that will help you to take control of your finances and I’m really pleased with the way it turned out.
The introduction of the planner has everything you need to work out your monthly budget, calculate your savings goals and learn to plan your meals along with a meal planning template for you to use each week and some other handy trackers to keep you on track.
Then the planner is broken down into months with each month having just what you need to manage your monthly finances with monthly goals tracking, no spend day trackers and a handy spending log so you can see where your money is going.
There’s a few other bits and bobs throughout the planner to help you stay on track and I genuinely think this will help all of us to get better with our money in 2017. Combine this financial planner with my upcoming series to ‘Make 2017 your money year’ and I am convinced that you will save pots of money.
You can buy the planner here and if you head over right now then you’ll get the earlybird price just because you’re super organised and I like that. 😉
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