Nine things you can do for your finances every week to help you stay on top of your financial goals and also your mental health and personal well-being. Sunday is a great day to get these things done when you prepare for your week ahead. You minimize the stress and the dread, you feel about the upcoming week which if we’re being honest a lot of us feel this way about Mondays and so let’s get into these nine key tips to help you keep your finances and your life in check.
- Review Your Budget
The first thing you want to do on Sunday or on the weekend is to review your budget for the week. I cannot stress the importance of a budget enough if you don’t already have one. You want to get one and his is because your budget is essentially your blueprint. It is you as the boss of your money, telling your money what to do. When you do your weekly budget review you can take a look at what your spending has been like.
You can look at your income, you can look at your upcoming expenses, you can review your bank statements to make sure your transactions happened as expected, you basically want to make sure that you have your eye on your money, and you understand what is going on and plan for the week ahead.In terms of what you’re going to be spending and the expenses you have coming up, as well as any income that you may have coming into your account as well.
- Plan Your Meal
The next thing you can do on Sundays is meal prep essentially, plan your meals and this can be great because it can save you a lot of time in terms of cooking. During the week and it could also save you money when you find yourself not having something to eat and then ordering out especially if that order was not part of your budget. You can meal prep by cooking in bulk and freezing items or you can simply create a menu of the things that you want to eat for the week.
- Schedule Your Bill Payments
Number three schedule your bill payments so take a look at your budget and determine what expenses you have coming up for the week ahead and then scheduled your plan to pay your bills. Whether you’re mailing the checks, or you’re logging into online accounts to make payments, or you have these bills automated. Sunday is a great time to check in on this and this way, you can avoid any late fees and make sure that you’re paying your bills on time.
- Going Back to Reviewing Your Budget
Number four, going back to reviewing your budget you want to spend. Some time checking your bank transactions for the previous week, this is just a simple exercise of logging into your bank accounts, logging into your credit card accounts, and looking at the transactions that went through the last week. So that you make sure that those are transactions that you actually made and you can compare those transactions to your budget.
- Restock Your Essentials
During your budget review another thing you can do is restock your essentials on the weekend. So go to the grocery store, run your errands, get the things you need to have in your home during the weekend. This will save you time and also save you stress. For me personally, there’s nothing worse than waking up on Monday morning and realizing that I don’t have any coffee because I didn’t stock up on the weekend. It’s also a good idea to tidy up your living space.
- Clean Your Personal Space
I can’t tell you how much better you feel if you start your week especially, if you’re working from home with a tidy clean space and I don’t mean going all out and deep cleaning and stressing yourself out. You know trying to scrub corners but really just putting things aside and having a calm and clutter free environment can make a huge difference. As to how you feel about your week, and how much you’re able to get done that week, just because you feel better another stress minimizer for the weekend.
- Review Your to-do list
For Sunday is to make and review your to-do list and when you plan all the things. You need to get done for the week. It helps you minimize stress because you can mentally prepare, you can write down the notes and plan out your schedule on your calendar. It just helps you approach that to-do list in a calm way because you are prepared to get those things done.
- Set Your Goals & Track Progress
Sunday is also a really great day to set your goals and track your progress. On the goals, you had for your prior week and so when it comes to your financial goals, your life goals, a lot of times your goals are big items that you want to accomplish. But when you take those goals and you break them down into weekly chunks, it makes them more attainable and they’re easy to approach.
- Make Small Chunks of your Big Goals
This is a great time to set your financial goals, set your life goals for the week based on those big goals that you have for yourself and also assess how your last week went review those goals take the lessons if you didn’t accomplish them and apply them to the next week it’s a good idea to make sure you do that review and also celebrate your wins and then finally decompress for the week ahead.