Welcome
Welcome to the 30 Days of Financial Wins Challenge!
For every email you receive you’ll also be pointed to a topic here in the Tiller Money Community.
If you’re brand new to the community make sure you sign up (upper right corner of this page) using your Tiller Money subscribed email account to reply to each challenge topic. You can also get more acquainted with the Tiller Money Community in general here otherwise just look out for the challenge emails to point you to the right topics.
The challenge topics are intended to offer motivation, inspiration, and guidance on following along and succeeding with the challenge. A big part of the success will be your active participation by replying to each topic to share your observations, goals, and learnings, which will encourage and motivate your challenge-mates to share too!
Don’t be shy. This is an inclusive and supportive community. Your voice matters. We do ask that you keep it courteous, positive, and friendly.
Advice on categories
In this first segment we ask you to customize your categories on the Categories sheet in your Foundation Template for Google Sheets if you haven’t already - or re-think your categories if you’ve been with Tiller Money for a bit and are starting fresh in a new Foundation Template.
We recommend keeping it simple. The Foundation Template includes some example categories that you can pick and choose from to help you get started. Overwrite or delete ones you don’t need and add new ones to the bottom of the list. If you’re unsure of how to group things, just stick with our example groups as a start and clear any that don’t apply.
Bills
Discretionary
Kids
Living
Primary Income
Transfer Types
Work
The simpler the structure for your categories and groups the easier they will be to remember as you’re categorizing and the more likely you’ll stick with it in the long run.
Accountability partner
In this segment we invite you to decide whether you want to work with an accountability partner through this challenge. Studies show that new habits stick faster when we check in with an accountability partner. This could be a friend, a spouse, or a colleague at work.
You can decide who and how much of a commitment you want to make along this journey. It could even be just committing that you’ll reply to each community topic in the challenge and have the community as a whole be your accountability partner!
Advice on setting financial goals
Setting financial goals can be both exciting and terrifying. The great thing is that you can change your mind later, especially after you’ve learned a bit about your spending habits and financial journey. We even ask you to re-evaluate your goals in a later segment of the challenge so don’t get stuck or think about it too hard.
Here are just a few ideas
- Save $100 a month for an emergency fund for a total of $1200 for the year
- Open a retirement account such as an IRA
- Most of my spending is aligned with my values this year
- Reduce my overall debt this year by $x
- Cut up and stop using my credit cards (if you have high credit card debt)
- Save enough money for the down payment on a house
- Open college savings funds for my kids
Give yourself the opportunity to dream big on these goals, and once the creative wave has passed pick one that you’d like to really focus on for the year. This can help set the foundation for the rest of your challenge. But how to choose?
You might use the SMART goal theory or the SUCCESS goal formula or just use your gut. Which of these strategies resonates most with you? Is there another strategy or goal setting method you’ve used in the past?
Your turn to share!
Click “reply” below to share your #1 goal for this year, and read and encourage others with their goals!
You can also share about what method you used to help you choose your #1 goal, how you decided on your other goals, and anything else to inspire your challenge-mates for setting goals!
Resources & Support
Resources
Here are some guides you may find useful as you work through the checklist for this segment:
- Feeding data into the Foundation template
- What to do if you have trouble adding an account
- What to do about account refresh errors
- What to do if you’re missing transactions
- A guide on refreshing and updating in Tiller Money Feeds sheets
Getting support
If you need help with completing any of the checklist items, including addressing account connection issues and errors, please reach out to our support team via the chat tool in the lower right corner of the Console at https://sheets.tillerhq.com/auth/google for the fastest response. The topics here are intended to be motivational, not for troubleshooting and the team via Chat can help you faster and more effectively than anyone here in the community.
a job change and 2 months of furlough certainly didn’t help, but this year will be even tighter! My goal is to stay within 10% of my budgeted cashflow.