How To Swallow An Elephant

August 25, 2015

How do you swallow an elephant? One bite at a time. The first time I heard this statement my first thought was: “Yuck! Can we come up an analogy that involves eating an over-sized sundae instead of an elephant?” Once I understood the concept, it became my mantra. Whenever something feels overwhelming, especially something that does not seem like fun, I automatically think, “one bite at a time.”

Recently, I was talking to a cousin of mine who was frustrated. When I asked her why, she said that this was the year for her to get her finances under control and she is in the same place she was at the beginning of the year. I asked her what was her problem and she said that she finds the process of trying to predict what she may spend, create a spending plan and track her expenses to be overwhelming and that she’d rather get a root canal.

I told her to create a spending plan in bite-sized pieces and start small. When she asked me what I meant, I gave her these three steps:

1. Start her spending plan at the beginning of the month. That way she can capture her spending for an entire month.

2. Track all of her spending for one month. My cousin had no idea what she spent her money on, much less how much she spent on those things so I knew creating a budget at this stage would be self-defeating to her. Her only goal was to track her expenses for a month. We looked at creating a tracking sheet in Excel, but she balked at the thought of using Excel, so we reviewed various expense tracking apps and she settled on Mint. Mint can be used to track expenses so her only goal was to make sure she categorized everything she spent for the month.

3. After a month of tracking her spending, use those numbers to create a spending plan. Now that she had an idea of what she spent in a month, it was much easier for her to create a “starter spending plan.” I call it a starter spending plan because more than likely she will have to adjust the numbers as she goes along.

She said that starting at the beginning of the month helped her capture all of her spending for a month, which gave her concrete numbers to use to start her budget. The unexpected benefit was the confidence she felt tracking her expenses. This confidence made her feel better about the spending plan. She also said the shock of seeing how much she spent on eating out made her realize how important it was for her to know how she is spending her money. So if tracking your expenses and creating a budget seems overwhelming, follow my mantra and take it in bite-sized pieces.