Adding Financial Wellness to Your Wellness Routine in the New Year: How to set realistic financial goals and add financial wellness as a key pillar to your wellness routine - Balanced Black Girl (2024)

It’s a new year and wellness is

the top of many people’s minds. At times, wellness can look like taking a yoga class and drinking a green smoothie. But a well-rounded wellness practice isn’t only physical – it should encompass mental, emotional, and financial wellness, too.

So while you’re adding more veggies to your diet and are trying out new workout classes, it’s also a great time to go over your finances and get your budget in check for the year to come. Let’s be honest, we don’t talk about financial wellness nearly enough in the healthy living space, but we should because the two are closely intertwined. Your overall stress level impacts your health big-time and for many people, financial worries are one of the main causes of stress and tension. Putting focused attention on your financial health can be really helpful for managing anxiety when it comes to financial matters.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve set out to create a budget and only stuck to it for a couple of weeks before jumping ship. Often times, it was because I created a budget that was overly complicated and didn’t accurately factor in all of my expenses and didn’t truly reflect my financial goals.

The key to creating an effective budget is to thoroughly account for the money you have coming in and going out. Identify all of your expenses and categorize them as they currently are, then strategize ways you can either cut back or allocate your money differently to help you reach your goals. While it is possible to do this on your own, I found participating in a Financial Health Check with the budgeting experts at BECU to be helpful. The Financial Health Check is a free, 45-minute personalized session with a BECU specialist designed to help members take action on savings, debt management, and budgeting. I found the session to be especially helpful for accountability and for providing helpful ideas of ways to maximize my budget that I didn’t think of myself; I was so used to trying the same old budgeting techniques over and over. Having a fresh set of eyes (with an expertise in personal finance) really helped me understand ways I could make my money work for me.

The number one habit you should develop to improve your financial wellness is to start tracking where your money goes each month. Take a look at your past few months of spending to better understand your habits and to start understanding where your money is really going. Keeping a close eye on what you’re spending and tracking as you go can help prevent surprises, and can alleviate anxiety over checking your bank account.

There are a number of ways you can track your spending and it’s important to find a system that works best for you. For years, I tried to track manually and would get overwhelmed by needing to remember to input all of my transactions into a spreadsheet or to write them down. After my Financial Health Check, I started using BECU’s Money Manager tool to automatically categorize my spending. I customized my spending categories in Money Manager according to the specific budget I created to help reach my goals. Now I can easily log on and track my spending and budget progress at a glance in a way that truly works for me, instead of using an arbitrary template. This has also helped me improve my saving habits because I can see when I have under-spent in certain areas of my budget and can roll extras over to savings.

Are you planning to revise your budget in the New Year? What are some of your financial goals for 2019?

This post is sponsored by BECU. All opinions are my own.