So you have now written down your expenses for the last month according to the last blog post but you are thinking “hey this is a lot of effort, why should I do this nonsense?” The answer is simple and difficult at the same time. Because it is your life, it is your money and it is your freedom that we are talking about.

All one has to do is to take a sheet of paper and add the numbers together for all the expenses of each month. You do not have to do it for months that are long gone by. Just start with the last month and then make it a habit to do this every month. That is enough. It is more than enough and far more than 99% of people do that live around you.

Yes it does take time to write down every month all your expenses and make a list. But once you have made this a habit it will not be that much work anymore. In fact, if you pay most of your bills with a card, you will anyway have already most information on your bank account and can just copy and paste the information. And also, the less you spend, the less effort it is to write up the list of your expenses every month. Not a bad reason to spend less money in general.

Coming back to the initial point, yes it is a lot of work, maybe 15 minutes every month, but it is also definitely worth it. Because doing this 15 minute effort every month means that following this you can become financially free and for that goal it is not too much work at all.

A clever step is of course not to use a physical pen and paper but a spreadsheet. Excel is expensive, unless you have it already installed and paid for on your computer. And buying Excel just to create a small list would really be a ridiculous expense. Thus, I would suggest that you use OpenOffice. You can download it for free and it has an Excel clone called “Calc” that you can easily use for this simple task. Or maybe you have a Gmail account. Then you can use the free Google “Calc” documents that you can create in Google Drive. No matter what you do, transitioning to a digital version of your spreedsheet is definitely worth the effort. Just make sure that you backup the file in another place so you dont lose everything you have done by chance.

Altogether, you have now the first tool to get started with your personal financial freedom and your path to becoming a financial unicorn. In the next blog entry, we will discuss long term expenses and how to tackle analyzing those. Stay tuned!