Track Your Financial Calories
You can simply get a book from the dollar store and write down everything you spend over a 30-day period. However, you'll still want to really drill down on your spending. Ask yourself these questions:
• What do you pay for your car insurance?
• How much is the interest on your debt costing you?
• How many lunches and dinners do you eat out?
• What does your home insurance cost?
• What about all of those subscriptions?
If you bank with one institution and use one debit/and or credit card for the month, you can easily have them do the bulk of the tracking for you. But remember, you still need to dig into your spending.
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Categorize Your Spending
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What are the top 3-4 categories that are trending for you and your family?
• Entertainment?
• Transportation?
• Fees?
• Interest charges?
Where's the waste? The fluffy financial calories? Were you aware that you were spending that much in those categories? I often find that my top wasters are: bottled water, forgotten or ill-used subscriptions, and smartphone data overages.
Calculate Your Yearly Spending
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Now multiply all of those by 12 to see where your money is going in a year. How do you feel about that? One of my readers that did this exercise reported that he was spending $3,200 a year on his Diet Coke habit. Bad for his health and his bank account. He bought a $200 soda stream instead and used the rest on a vacation!
Where Will You and Your Family Trim the Fat?
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Make sure to get the entire family involved. Keep in mind that retailers have used the “it's just a few dollars a day" trick to get us to spend more on everyday items. But when you add those up annually, you can see the true cost and evaluate if you need to pivot with your choices.
Tip: How to save time when creating a tab module from scratch.
Create one tab that has the images, text format, animations, and interactions you want the other tabs in the module to have. Copy and paste the tab and change the names of the pasted tab folders in the layers panel. You can then change the text and images in each tab. This is more efficient than making each tab from scratch.
Round the corners on images and rectangles.
To do this, select an image or rectangle and change the value under "Corner Radius" in the Design tab in the Inspector Panel.
Create digestible content and save screen real-estate by condensing lengthy content into categories that can be viewed on separate tabs.
Template - Horizontal Tab Module
1280px x 720px
Turn flat objects into multidimensional, dynamic content by adding a drop shadow.
To apply a drop shadow, select the shape or image and add a shadow in the design panel. Experiment with the shadow color, blurriness, and position in relation to the asset.
To replace an image, select the png or jpeg on the canvas or in the layers panel and click the "Replace image" button, which is next to the image thumbnail in the design panel. Any applied animation to the original image will carry over to the new one.
Tip: Try to make the new image a similar size and dimension to the image being replaced.
