I know some of us here are planner nerds so I thought I’d start a thread about how we incorporate finances and budgets into our monthly and weekly planning.
I feel like it’s the one thing that my current planner system falls down on - I use the Passion Planner like @anomalily and while it’s great for personal and professional projects, I don’t really use it for anything other than keeping a track of when bills are due and as a reminder to invoice people. I have rough yearly and quarterly goals but I don’t use it to track my daily spending etc and I feel like I should… I budget in Google Sheets but I think it would be worth having some sort of tracking or record in the same place where the rest of my life is kept.
I’m particularly interested in how bullet journallers do it, so if any of you are BuJo fanatics then join me in my tragic stationery/life organising mashup.
I bujo, but in a very low-key way. I use the bujo for financial stuff in the following ways:
I use it to actually work out my financial goals – for example, I have pages in there that are essentially my scratch paper for strategic saving. If I spend XX this year, then I’ll be able to put this much into 401k; this much into HSA; this much into regular savings; this much into my Roth IRA. This is the most useful way in which I use my bujo to do financial stuff. It’s the type of big, long-term thinking that I like to have on paper.
I use it to do some six months goals tracking. Basically, I make little bars and fill them in as I (hopefully) meet my goals each month – green is “yay I did it” and red is “behind.” Sometimes I keep up with this; sometimes I don’t. It depends on what kind of motivation I need.
I also usually have some sort of financial goal in my monthly goals list. Again, I make a bar and fill it in as I complete it. For example, if I had a goal to save $500, I’d outline five little grid boxes in a row and fill them in for each $100 I put into savings. I tend to keep up with this a little more, and find it a little more motivating than my 6-month financial pages.
I’m not sure how I missed this topic before! I am also a casual bullet journal-er.
I mostly use my journal for habit tracking, meal planning, and to do lists. But I did make a savings tracker when we were saving for our down payment, and now that we have the house, I made a pay-off-the-mortgage tracker:
Each block represents a monthly payment. The door represents our down payment (probably NOT to scale). It’s fun to track our extra principal payments and color extra blocks in as needed.
BuJo peeps: what recommendations would you make for reasonably low priced journals? I am BuJo-curious but not sure if I will stick with it, so want something that won’t cost me $30AUD.
@nnls thank you! I will check out Kmart at some point.
@Clare-Dragonfly I definitely want a grid or dot one (or maybe even blank…?) for the way I want to use it. I like lined notebooks for more traditional journalling though
I use the bujo for financial stuff in the following ways:
