Painless Money Management Via Your Sock Drawer

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The same can be said of tackling any daunting task, whether it’s spring cleaning your Davis apartment or organizing your scattershot finances.

Lifehacker.com calls it the sock-drawer method, comparing cleaning your whole house to organizing one sock drawer. Basically, bite off one task at a time, complete it and move on to the next.

What financial task, exactly, is the equivalent of your sock drawer—the first little thing you should tackle to make your life easier? You know the answer to that better than anyone else…Use the following strategies to bring it to light.

Over five evenings, sit down and answer one of these questions. Write a list of answers—at least five for each question. When you’ve finished your question for that evening, put it and the answers away and don’t look at them again for the time being. The next night, answer the next question, and so on, until you’ve finished.

1. What things do I want to start doing about money that I’ve never done?
2. What money habits do I want to change that I haven’t changed?
3. What things do I want to stop doing about money that I haven’t stopped?
4. What things do I want to say about money that I’ve never said?
5. What things do I want to learn about money that I haven’t learned?

When the weekend comes, go over your lists. It’s time to figure out your priorities. Circle the issues that come up more than once and place a #1 by those. Then place a #2 by the next most common (and therefore, most important) and keep going until you’ve worked your way through the list.

Now that you know what your personal money pressure points are, you can make a plan to deal with them. For more information on how to do that, visit the link above.