My very first memory of budgeting and saving for anything was back as a child when I had to save for my first television set. This was in the early 90s when the cheapest colour set cost about £120 and my pocket money consisted of about £1 a week. Throw in a few birthday and christmas cash gifts and the savings time required came in at around 2 years. A lifetime for someone at that age!

While my siblings would recieve their pocket money and promptly spend it all on sweets each Saturday morning.. I collected my valued single pound coin and added it into the piggy bank by my bed. It’s hard to appreciate the value and effort of saving when your money drops down into a dark hole and you’re unable to see anything of the pile it’s joined within the china enclosure. So I decided to cellotaped together 3 pages of blank paper and began painstakingly drawing out 120 individual lines in a ladderd thermometer shape reaching up to the word TV in big letters at the top.

Everytime I dropped another £1 into the piggy bank, I would get out the thick red marker and colour in a single individual section bringing me one line closer to the top. My savings chart was hung up proudly on the bedroom wall and every morning I would look at it and know that it represented my progress to the goal. Every line coloured in was a small personal victory and being able to look down the chart reminded me of all the previous weeks’ effort involved to get there.

The Janurary Challenge

Fast forward to today and I’m currently reaching the end of January’s challenge to give up alcohol and lose weight. Every morning I step onto the scales and make a record of the weight shown. Every pound lost feels like a victory and any pounds gained are used to motivate me to work harder for the next day. I know of others who are attempting similar New Year challenges but arn’t going to weigh themselves until the very end. Speaking to them and it’s obvious they’ve lost their focus on the challenge as each day drifts by without any benchmark to the last.

If it wasnt for this daily reminder and focus on the challenge I’ve set myself; I’ve no doubt that it would have been forgotten or deprioritised. I would have been tempted to have ‘just a couple’ of pints at the weekend knowing that it wouldnt have a measureable affect until I actually done the measuring at the end of the month and by which time it may have levelled out.

 Applying it to bigger things

For many people, retirement is an extremely distant event which our actions today have little impact upon. Saving for something so large and distant makes individual contributions seem insignificant in comparison and there’s a great temptation to just set things on autopilot to be reviewed once a decade (or more!). But by doing this you rob yourself of the satisfaction in seeing your own achievement grow and are unable to take quick corrective action should things begin to slide.

Before starting this blog I’d never really kept a log of my income/expenses and networth. I knew roughly how things were going and would celebrate once certain milestones were achieved but really my financial brain was on autopilot and money would just come in and out of the bank account without much thought. Now I try to record everything in the monthly reviews and these tell me exactly how I’m doing and where improvements can be made. When it’s been a tough month and expenses are running high, I can still look at the increasing networth figure and know that things are still moving in the right direction.

Micromanage your goals

It doesnt matter if your goal is to lose weight, retire early or save up for your first colour televison set. Anything can be a relativly large and distant dream which individual contributions seem almost insignificant to. By breaking down the goal into smaller individual chunks of achievements and tracking the regular progress you’ll be more motivated to continue on the path you set or take the correcting action when situations change.

Have you had a big goal you split into individual smaller achievements? Or have you not recorded progress and discovered things had gone wrong for too long before you noticed? Please let us know in the comments below.