Do you devour every piece of personal finance information that you can get your hands on in hopes of finding the magic key that will suddenly turn your financial life around? If so, the best thing that you can do right now is to stop acquiring new information and put what you already know into action. I am guilty of doing this very thing, so I am not bringing up the topic to point fingers at anyone except myself.
If you stop and think about it, this very principle is true no matter what it is that you are trying to improve for yourself. Whether it is your financial situation, your weight, your health, your looks, or something else entirely one thing remains the same. Until we take what we know and turn it into what we do, we will just keep doing the same old things that have not been working for us. I believe that most of us are very, very smart and know a lot of things. If we begin to put even a fraction of what we know into action, I think that we would be amazed by what we can accomplish.
Since we are concerning ourselves with personal finance, let’s think about what most of us probably already know. We know that we can earn money in a number of ways including working and investing. We also know that we can spend money in an infinite number of ways and that it is up to us to choose how we will spend the money that we earn. Another thing that is as certain as the sun rising every morning and setting every night is that if we spend more money than we earn, we will go into debt. It is probably also not a stretch to say that we are well aware that saving money does not just happen; you have to make an effort to do it.
With all of these things that we know, there are so many things that we could do differently. It can be overwhelming if you think about it that way, so a good way to begin is to select just one thing that you know and to do something about it, no matter how simple or how small. Things like writing down how you spend your money instead of just doing it, or making the effort to set aside five dollars a week to save and then increasing the amount that you save each week as you get better and better at figuring out how to do it. You already know many things that you could do to change your finances. It is time to set aside learning for a little bit and just do it.
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