How often do you end up at the end of the year, usually around tax time, looking at your bank account and yearly Income Statement, and wondering where on earth your money went? It’s time to take control and tell your money where to go. Here’s ten tips to gtake control of your money!

1. Make a commitment never to use a credit card again. Debit cards yes, credit no.

2. Pay cash for your purchases. This means planning your shopping trips ahead of time!

3. Set a budget and STICK TO IT! Write your budget up each month with all your income and expenditure for that month accounted for. If it isn’t in the budget, it doesn’t get spent! If something comes up then the budget needs to be modified, the funds need to be ‘found’ from one expenditure and transferred to another.

4. Set up an automatic savings plan for next Christmas. Even just $10 a week will give you $500 next Christmas. Set it up as an automatic transfer out of your pay or bank account, if you don’t see it then you won’t miss it!

5. Set aside $1000 minimum as an emergency fund. Don’t touch it for anything that you could have planned for and didn’t. For example, buying Christmas gifts is not an emergency, replacing the fridge that died unexpectedly is.

6. Keep track of your net worth. Each month, the first or last day is good, work out all your debts and all your assets. Keep track of them. If your net worth is not increasing each month you need to work out where the loss is happening and make changes.

7. Pay off all your debts, using the Snowball method. There are two schools of though here, one is to pay off the lowest amount first up to the highest debt, the other way is to pay off the highest interest rate first. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. A great website to compare the two, and work out how long it will take you to get out of debt, is at the Snowball Debt Calculator.

8. Give away 10% of your income. It’s one of the laws of the universe, that those who give will receive. What goes around comes around, in spades!

9. Teach your kids to budget and involve them in the family budget. They need to see what’s coming in and where it goes out, and to understand the expenses of running a household. Kids need to understand that a plastic card is not the answer to every want, that it has to be paid back with interest, and that money really doesn’t just come out of a hole in the wall, someone has to work to put it in there first!

10. Give your kids jobs to do around the house so they earn their own money, then teach them to give some away, save some and spend some.