00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 695 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Doug and I'm Carol Pitner. And we're the authors of raising your money savvy family for next generation financial independence. And we challenge you to really focus on becoming money savvy. One way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend,
00:00:25 Scott Mader. It also lets you focus on the other side of the equation because if you're tracking where your money's going, it begins to make you think about, are there ways that I can make more money because now instead of that making more money and it just kind of goes away and I don't even know where it went. I can take that extra and I can put it towards what I want.
00:00:54 Welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world today's episode about impacting the world through stewarding your treasures.
00:01:33 I talk with you about why, what you measure improves. I talk about focusing on your goals to achieve bore power with money. And I also share why this can often seem less efficient, though. It really isn't. As we talk about stewarding your treasures, wouldn't it be great. If you could support this podcast and do it without costing yourself an extra dime,
00:01:55 it turns out you can. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon and a small commission, we'll come back to support the show. If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. So when talking about your money, I often talk about the budget,
00:02:20 the plan that you set, how you should look into the future and plan what you're going to do with your money before it's actually come so that you use your money in a way that's aligned with your priorities and your values. But today I want to talk a little bit about tracking. You know, the opposite side of budgeting is knowing where things went after they went there and seeing whether that's an alignment with your plan.
00:02:47 You have the truth is what you measure has a tendency to improve. Even if you don't think you're going to be taking any action about it. This is why just simply wearing a Fitbit and looking at the number of steps you take each day tends to cause you to take a few more steps. You're a little bit more likely to go ahead and take the stairs instead of the elevator.
00:03:08 You're a little bit more likely to take that extra lap around the hallway. After you've begun to pay attention to how many steps you take in the day. Even if you aren't actually getting up in the morning and deliberately going out and getting your 10,000 steps, it begins to become a little bit of a game where you kind of push yourself each and every day to go a little further,
00:03:29 to take a few more steps. The same thing happens with our money. Just paying attention to where your money went. Just writing down where you're spending your money has a tendency to cause you to begin to change some of the things that you're spending your money on. You know, the truth is most of us have no idea how much we spend on certain things.
00:03:52 When I first have people sit down and do a budget, oftentimes they discover they have no idea what they've been spending on groceries or eating out or other things that they do each and every month, but they really just haven't ever really paid attention to what is actually happening to how much they're spending in different areas of their life. It's almost inevitable to that is people begin to pay attention to this.
00:04:17 They discover what we call leaky buckets. They discover areas where money is just going away. It may just be a subscription or two that they've been paying for for months and they aren't actually using anymore. It may be a larger something. It may be that they discover that they've been wasting a lot of money going out to eat. And so they simply begin to go out to eat a little less.
00:04:41 Those changes in behavior have big ramifications over a long period of time. This is why when we begin to focus on our goals, when we begin to know what's important to us, when we've done the exercise of identifying what our big priorities are, what our big values are, what are our most important things that we value above all others, then all of a sudden your money begins to take on power because it begins to move you more in that direction than against it.
00:05:15 You begin to fight instead of against yourself, you begin to go with yourself. You're not fighting as much. You're not arguing as much. There's not as much problem with making those decisions because you've already sort of made the decision ahead of time. You've identified what's most important. And now it's just a matter of seeing if it's an alignment and then when it's not making the adjustments so that it begins to become more in alignment each and every day,
00:05:47 it's a process, but it happens. And you know, it often seems at first, like it's going to be less efficient that sitting down once a week and tracking what I've spent my money on. Well somehow slow me down. You know, it takes a lot of time. It's hard to do, but the truth is it doesn't, it takes 10 or 15 minutes once a week to be able to do this,
00:06:09 this isn't taking hours of your life to track each and everything that you're doing. It's looking at where your money's going so that you can simply identify whether it's in alignment with what you want it to do. It actually becomes a bit of a game two. You begin to challenge yourself to do better this week than last week. Can you maybe spend a little less on eating out?
00:06:33 Can you maybe go out one less timer or spend a little less on gas or maybe there's another area. Can you find one subscription or one other product that you've been buying that perhaps you don't need, or you can save a little bit of money on it also lets you focus on the other side of the equation because if you're tracking where your money's going,
00:06:54 it begins to make you think about, are there ways that I can make more money because now instead of that making more money and it just kind of goes away and I don't even know where it went. I can take that extra and I can put it towards what I want. I can actually use the money that comes in in a way that's more efficient,
00:07:13 more effective and more aligned with my priorities and values. And then all of a sudden that working extra or doing other things like that, that bring in a little extra money, becomes fun instead of work because you know, it's actually going to do something that you want it to do instead of just being wasted are going away, are being spent in a way that's not in alignment with what you really treasure,
00:07:39 what you really value. What you really think is the most important thing in your life. And when you do that, when you get that focus, when you begin to track and pay attention to where things have gone, then things get better. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener,
00:08:08 we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of treasures, you can sign up for our treasures tips by going to inspired stewardship.com/treasures or text in the U S four four two two two treasures tips. And we'll send you five weeks of our best tips on stewarding your treasures until next time,
00:08:47 invest your time, your talent and your treasures. Develop your influence and impact. Whoa.