What You Don’t Know IS Hurting Your Success as a Small Business
We’re all familiar with the phrase “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” Unfortunately, especially when it comes to money, it’s completely wrong. What we don’t know about money can lead to extremely painful and expensive mistakes and cost us success as small business owners.
What we want to achieve with this post is nothing grand. No big concepts or sweeping statements. Our goal is to provide just a few simple, practical things you can implement right away that can save anywhere from a few, to a few hundred, dollars a month.
The first step to getting a handle on your finances is taking the time to sit down and figure out in detail how you are spending your money. This is obviously easiest if you keep your financial records in a computer program like Quicken or Quickbooks – which you should absolutely be doing as an entrepreneur.
Something fascinating happens when you start to really look at your finances. All of these things on which you didn’t realize you were spending money, will suddenly surface. It is amazing (and frightening) to discover how much is disappearing through financial leaks we don’t even know are there.
Some examples:
Where do you bank? How much are you paying just to have your account? Are you charged extra if you actually go into the bank and make deposits or withdrawals with a teller? We had one student who had never realized she was spending $30 per month in “Bank Charges.” Explore what options exist for free checking, free savings etc: then shift away from whoever you are currently banking with that is over charging you for this stuff.
What credit card do you use? Another student in one of our financial seminars had a “great deal” with American Express. She had responded to a great sounding card offer – designed to help “build success in a small business.” She was getting all kinds of special stuff… and was paying around $350 per year for it. Once she looked into the services that were actually important to her, it turned out that there was a free option that provided everything she needed. She had been paying that extra money every year for nothing.
Do you carry credit card “insurance?” We have all been guilty of this one. You know, the tele-marketer who signs us up for a free 30-day trial of some service, offering a free credit report or something similar. All we have to do is call and cancel if we don’t want to continue… and it seems such an easy thing to do at the time… and yet somehow we never do! Then three years later we find out we have been spending $40 per month for something we never used or cared about… you get the picture.
The point is that, with just a little bit of effort, all of us can probably find an extra $25-$100 or even more – just by taking the time to really figure our where our money is going. On the surface, it may not seem like a lot – but when you’re committed to creating success in your small business, this is money that can start going to paying down debt, building investment accounts and actually creating a prosperous future. Visit http://www.abundanceboundsystem.com for more money saving ideas and this month, make a commitment to find and plug your money leaks.
Putting it off will just make it more expensive.
