 Personal finance seems really simple. You basically just spend less than you earn, you stash some cash underneath your bed for a rainy day, and voila, somehow you invested and somehow 20 years later you're a millionaire, right? The reality is that personal finance is a lot more complicated. Because if it were so simple that that's all you had to do, then come Friday night no one would go over their budget for the margarita and the hangover on Saturday morning. Now in this video I want to share what my minimalist personal finance plan is, how it's worked, and some of the results I've gotten so far in my life. What's up guys? Alex Hine here, author of the book Master of the Day. Now look, if you are working on personal finance as one of your goals, so not only am I including the first chapter of this book down there in the link as a free download, you can also get my personal goal setting worksheet that I've used to pay off a huge chunk of my student debt in medical school, again that's all on that personal development worksheet down there below so you can go check it out in the description. So for me personal finance is super simple. I have a simple system and a complicated system and I'm just going to share with you the simple system. It really comes down to tracking, saving, and automating above all. So when I say tracking, all you have to do in personal finance is it's just like fitness. When you track what goes in your mouth it brings awareness to where your money's going. The way I track is by with a daily spreadsheet so corny but it works so well. The way I save is I save 10% and it goes into a personal development account that I reinvest only into things that can make me more money, more happy, more successful, more fulfilled, any kind of resource that's growth oriented, seminars, coaches, whatever. And the last thing is I automate. So let's jump into these a little bit more. All right, so step one is always tracking. I don't want you to use this as a budget where you're always having anxiety over your spending because for most people budgets just don't work. So the way I keep it simple is everything I spend outside of my major spending categories day to day I track. So my friend put together this spreadsheet and it's called Alex spending and expenses and all it is is something that's super simple and I'll even include the link to it below so you can use it for yourself. You punch in a few basic pizza data, you put in your income, you put in the tax rate or if you're an employee you don't have to worry about that and then it'll calculate what you have monthly after taxes put in your rent, your gas, your spending, gym, grocery, food, phone, loans, whatever it is, and then whatever you're saving and at the end it's going to calculate monthly your spending money and then weekly your spending money. And then for each week of the month you put together the week of, for example, September 2, September 9, September 16, etc. And this spreadsheet will auto calculate how much you have to spend that week. So for example, this week here on September 2, I have, you know, this gives me $156 of spending money per week, maximum. And that includes when I've looked at what I've put down here. I put down Tuesday, I had dinner and coffee, I ordered some bougie pillow for $75, got acupuncture on Wednesday, Wednesday went out to dinner, Thursday went to wine tasting, and it auto calculates what I have left. So all it is is bringing daily awareness to your spending and it's showing you are you on track or are you not. The same is true of if you're trying to lose weight or get fit. The first thing I do is just have my clients track with no judgment, no changes, just track. The second thing is saving 10% of your income or your salary, your post-hack salary, okay? So let's say your salary is $3,000 a month. What that means is that you're going to automatically save $300 a month, which seems like a lot, but it's going to be for your own personal development. Now the way I personally do that is I use Capital One, Capital One 360, which is one of the only services I know that automatically draws it from my checking account every month. It draws, I give myself a $3,000 a month salary from my company, the lowest I can live on, and then that 10% goes into a separate account I can't touch and it pulls it out without me knowing it. So I look at my personal development account and at the end of the year I'm figuring out okay, what conferences do I want to go to? What books do I need to get to the next level? What coaches do I need to hire? Where do I need to go to improve my ability to be happier to earn more? It's investing into personal development, so it's called my personal development fund because I believe that every dollar you invest in yourself can come back 10x or 100x both financially and in other ways, but you have to be constantly learning and trying new things. And the third thing of course is you can't rely on yourself to manually do those transfers. You have to automate to bypass any desire to use your willpower. And like of course, when I have $100 my account, how am I going to automate $300? How am I going to manually do that into a separate account? Not going to happen. But when you see you only have $100 and that money is already saved, then you're not going to spend anything and you will have had that money. But again, day to day it's super simple. The only thing I do day to day is I track what I spent. Everything else is put into the spreadsheet, everything else is automated and it's all based on bringing awareness to what I'm spending on, the major spending categories, etc. And that is my super simple personal finance life improvement plan. Now I actually paid off $30,000 plus dollars my first year of medical school by doing that and it was purely because one I lived on little and I had my own income, but also because I was bringing a lot of awareness to what I was spending my money on. I was not eating out really more than once or twice a week. But the whole point was that a lot of awareness to what I was spending and automatically drawing out savings so that there was no way for me to know where to touch it. So I hope that video helps you guys. Before you go comment there below. Let me know for you if there's a personal finance system you've known that works well for you. And again, I've put together that free, that's kind of like your best year goal setting worksheet. It's in the description box there below. It's the first link right above the fold there and it's going to bring you to how I set personal goals and each year one goal is always personal finance. You can get my last two videos right here and right here.