A Toast to Keeping Track — Day 6 — As Life Happens | By Vindya Vithana
The highlight of my weekend was interviewing a veteran figure in the Financial Sector of my country. (I will link the article here once it is published)
Towards the end of the interview, I asked him what would be the most important financial habit one could develop in their life.
His answer was to always keep track of things.
Watch your money like a hawk — how it comes and how it goes.
I have always loved keeping track of things in pretty much every aspect of my life.
I have notebooks, spreadsheets, diaries, journals and all kinds of things for this purpose. In fact, just the other day I had to make a separate spreadsheet to keep track of my other spreadsheets!
So today, let me write about keeping track of things — or as I’d normally like to call it, Self-Monitoring!
As I’ve mentioned a few times in my earlier posts of this series, in my uncontrolled and natural state, I could be one of the least productive and laziest people on Earth.
Therefore, every passing day I have to keep on pushing myself to do things.
When you keep track of things; when you document your movements as you go in a piece of paper or a spreadsheet, it forces you to have a good look at yourself.
If you let yourself just float from one day to another and from one paycheck to another by doing the bare minimum and without having a true awareness of what you do, it is likely that you will never make any progress or increase your quality of life.
I have seen people making “new year’s resolutions” in January every year, and slacking off every single time. And then they try to get away from it by joking about how silly it is to make these “resolutions” anyway.
Imagine you actually kept the resolutions you made in the past few years. Imagine how “better” you’d be if you just kept track, monitored and actually kept yourself accountable.
It is not easy, oh I know! However, it is not impossible either.
Since I started this entry speaking about finances, let me focus a little more on that topic.
In my life, I have met two people who religiously kept track of their finances. They also had truly wholesome lives where they have been successful not only financially, but also socially and in other aspects as well.
They are also two of the most charitable, well-traveled and overall truly intelligent people I have had the good fortune to know.
I have also met too many people who spend their money so recklessly and joke about “being broke” two days after they got their paycheck.
Life is not all about money, true, however, the quality of your life can largely depend on how stable you are financially. For that, you have to be responsible.
You have to keep yourself in check. You have to be conscious about how you spend whatever little or big amount of money that you make.
Too many young people miss out on great experiences that they should get while young, merely because they have been irresponsible about their finances.
If you have not been doing it, you are not too late to start.
Here’s to keeping track…
Cheers!
