How to Stay Focused on Your Budgeting Goals

In today’s fast-paced world, staying focused on your budgeting goals can be a challenge for sure. Distractions and endless opportunities to spend money can make it easy to lose focus on your budgeting and spending/saving goals. As of 2023, the average American has over $90,000 in debt, which includes credit card debt, mortgages and student loans. I imagine lots of people, like me, have a goal of getting rid of the debt that is weighing them down. And to do that, we need to focus!

In this blog post, I’m sharing four things that can help you stay focused on your budgeting goals. I’ll be sharing practical tips and my own experiences to encourage you on your budgeting journey.

Here we go! Let’s dig in!

Make sure the goals you are setting are meaningful to you.

Why do you want to achieve the goal, and what will attaining it mean for your life?

What is your budgeting goal? Do you want to save for a new car, or a new home? Just have more financial security, with a savings account or an emergency fund so you don’t panic when unexpected expenses pop up? Do you want to get to the end of the month with money left in your checking account, or avoid late fees on your bills? Figure out what your specific goal is. Then look closely at how your life might be if you attained it.

For me, my goal (long-term) is to be debt-free in three years. This goal has huge meaning for me because when we are debt-free, I will be able to at least semi-retire. This is meaningful to me because I will have more time to spend with my husband and I’ll be able to work on projects that I currently have very limited time to work on. I am willing to make lots of sacrifices now so that I can enjoy these benefits in the long run.

Make sure the goals you are setting are attainable.

I’m a big fan of the SMART goals framework. I think it really helps in setting achievable goals. And I think that the “attainable” part is the part that can be hard. Because sometimes the goal we want to achieve is far, far away.

Becoming debt-free can seem unattainable, depending on your current financial situation. It can feel like forever when you’re making only minimum payments on high-interest debt. I had to make some big life changes before my goal of becoming debt-free became realistic and achievable The main thing that helped was opening my family child care business. This increased our income significantly and now we are able to see real progress on our goal of becoming debt-free.

So I think it’s important to look at whether your goal is attainable in your current situation. To reach your financial goal, do you need to increase your income? If so, how will you do that? What needs to happen for you to be able to do it? This leads us to our next tip…

Break down your budgeting goals into manageable steps.

I often set big goals and then get discouraged when I don’t make progress. But I’ve found that breaking down my goals into smaller steps makes them seem more achievable and less daunting. This approach has helped me stay focused on my financial goals and make progress towards them.

I have found that the Clever Fox Budget Planner is the perfect thing to help me break my goals down into small and specific goals and to track progress on our debt payoff. Paying off the total amount of debt we owed certainly sounded disheartening. How in the world would we ever do it? But taking that big nasty number, breaking it down, and specifying how much I want to pay off in the next three months sounds (and is) achievable. Small achievements toward your bigger goal are great way to keep yourself motivated, and that will help you stay focused.

Basically, you want to break your long-term goals down into a series of short-term goals. For example, if you are just beginning to learn to live on a budget, a practical first step is to look at how much money you are currently spending, and then adjusting your spending habits so they are in line with your income. If your goal is to have $5000 in an emergency savings account, you would make a short term goal of saving a small amount of money each month.

What little things can you do that will propel you toward your bigger goal? Determine the small, actionable steps that will help you move closer to achieving that goal.

I think a cousin of having goals that are too big is having too many goals at once. I have done this, and like many things, it is hard to do all the things, and do all of them well. With a whole bunch of goals, you have a whole bunch of steps to achieve all of those goals, and it can become overwhelming. I am focusing on our finances, specifically my big, BIG goal of becoming debt-free in three years. I have other goals/aspirations in other areas of my life, but our financial goal is the big one, and it is receiving my focus and attention.

Have routines or systems in place.

Habits and routines are key to staying focused as you use your budget to improve your financial picture. Personal finance is…personal, and so the things I do may not be exactly what another person would do. But do have some type of system or routine in place to help you maintain control of your finances.

What I do daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly to manage our finances

• Daily: Each day, I check our bank accounts. This is just a quick check-in to make sure everything is as it’s supposed to be. I also be sure to get any receipts from my husband. He does most of our errands during the week, so if he has a receipt for me, I put it in the front of my Clever Fox Budget Planner.
• Weekly: Once a week, usually on Sunday, I sit down and log any expenses for the week, using receipts and online banking. At this time, I also pay any bills that have come in since the last week. I used to pay bills once a month, but found it to be emotionally draining to send all that money out at once. So now I do it weekly. I think it is a good idea to log expenses on a regular basis, because if it stacks up, it’s much more time-consuming and likely to just be put off. I check our grocery and household budget to be sure we have not overspent for the week, and then I make our meal plan and do our grocery pickup order.
• Monthly: At the end of the month, I add up all of our spending, and then I get to do nerdy math stuff and figure out the percentage of each category for our spending and make a colorful pie chart. It’s also check-in time: What worked well? What could I have done better? What will I improve or change in the upcoming month? I also set up our budget for the next month and tally up how much our total debt went down. Then I look at how we are doing on our savings goals and check our retirement savings. This monthly check-in is an easy way to see our progress toward our money goals.
• Quarterly: Every three months, I revisit my goals and see what I have achieved and then set goals for the upcoming quarter.

These tasks may be different for different people. I do well with a paper-and-pencil budgeting system. Other people may prefer a spreadsheet or an app. The important thing is to be consistent. Having routines like these in place will help you stay on top of your finances, in control of your money and help you have a brighter financial future.

Until next time, happy budgeting!