4. Accountability: Staying on Track

Hello, and welcome to this module, accountability and staying on track. So we have covered quite a bit of ground. And at this point, what we want to do is make sure we stay on track with everything we’ve put in place. So here is what we’re going to cover. So the first thing I’m going to get into is the cash success meeting and what we’re going to do moving forward to ensure that we stay on the right path with our cashflow. Then we’re going to go into customizing your, my cash clarity system. Um, just want to cover a couple of more key points with this, just to make sure you have a really good handle on how to make sure that all of this stuff looks good and it’s working and flowing for you in your financial situation. Then I’m going to get into syncing your accounts again, with my cash clarity, not just your initial financial accounts, but all the accounts.

So that way you can have clarity around your finances and where you stand. I’m going to break down reducing bank fees and late fees. So just some housekeeping things to ensure that moving forward, you can avoid these in your financial situation. Then I’m going to break down financial clarity with your transactions. Because again, we talked about this in previous modules. However, I want to make sure you have the clarity around all of your transactions and then what to do on a weekly bi-weekly basis to ensure that you have that clarity. And then lastly, I’m going to break down your balance sheet liquidity in your budget, which is key key principles. So as you can tell with this whole program, my whole goal has been to put you in position to leverage not only your credit, but your cash flow. And we’ve been, we spend a lot of time this week on cashflow.

So I want to really show you guys how you can really maximize all of these resources. So let’s go and hop right in. So the cast success meeting, this is an exciting meeting, very similar to your credit success meeting. But the point of this cash success meeting is to make sure that you can stay on track with your cashflow, stay on track with everything that we’ve put in place. So what we’re going to do is on the first thing of what you don’t understand is you cannot improve what you do not measure. So as you guys can see accountability tracking organization, all of this stuff is really important. So you start to shift your, your behavior and your mindset when it comes to your finances. In addition to that, now that we know that we’ve put these things in place and we’re going to be measuring it, we’re going to be tracking them.

We can now see it, where we can enhance our results. Additional thing is that I want you guys to remember your your, your, your priority. So when you’re having this cash success meeting, you want to be thinking about the past. So those past commitments that we already made, we also want to be thinking about the next 7 to 14 days. So when we’re having this meeting, Hey, look, what, what can I do over the next seven days to reward myself for, to take care of some, some things that are, I really want to do with me, myself personally, or my family or my spouse. So again, we still wouldn’t be thinking about today, but we don’t want today to overshadow our future with our cash. So when we’re having this cash success meeting, we’re going to be thinking about this as well. So you can know, okay, this is what I have to take care of, where I am.

The other thing is, and I want to reiterate this being broke does not mean poor, right? So just because I’m broke, i.e. I don’t have money in my financial priority list to allocate towards a frivolous thing. Doesn’t mean I’m poor. You’ll still be able to navigate and do things that you want to do. But again, it’s okay to start saying, no, it’s okay to say, Hey, look, if somebody asks you, especially if you’re single, if somebody asks you, Hey, look, can we go out for drinks? Or can we go do X, Y, Z, or can we do so-and-so? And so-and-so, you may not have that money allocated in your cashflow or your budget. And you know what this doesn’t even have to do with you being single. And I don’t want you to say no to your significant other, but you can just say, Hey, look right now, based off everything that we discussed, everything that we said was important to us, this decision, isn’t going to be in alignment with the goals that we said we want to do accomplish.

So I’ll do it, but just know when we do this, we’re taking away from self. And then the future is that, is that, is that what you want to do? And again, it’s a tough conversations, little direct, but at least it levels the playing field and puts you in a really good position to know, Hey, look, we’re going to, we’re doing this, but we’re doing this because it’s a present decision, right? But again, I just want to reiterate being broke does not mean poor. The other thing is I want to make sure that when you’re doing this cashflow control, um, this cash success meeting that you’ve reviewed your capital control template. So at the beginning of this week, we sat down and we got really clear about all of our buckets. We got really clear about where we were putting our money. So we want to continue to review this just to make sure we’re staying on track.

And then also during this cash success, meaning what we’re going to do is review all of your transactions are going to review my transaction. You know, your transactions over the last 7 to 14 days, whenever you’re doing this meeting, then the other thing we want to do is review our spending categories. So we want to see if we’re on track with those buckets. So am I on track with my fixed bucket? Or am I off track? Typically you should be on track with your fixed bucket. It’s going to be that variable bucket and future bucket. That you’ll be able to determine whether or not you’re on track or off track. And then what you also are going to need to do is rename and or split your transactions. So as you’re moving forward, you’ll need to make sure that you’re doing this. So that way your transactions are categorized in a correct fashion.

Now I’m going to show you how to make sure you can do that in this particular, in this particular module. Now, again, what we want to do is use Google calendar. So what we want to do in my opinion, and my suggestion, my recommendation is you want to select the day after or before payday. So you’re going to schedule your cash success meeting, not on a random day, but after or before payday. So if you get paid on Friday, my suggestion is you have that cash success meeting either on Thursday, or you have that cash assessed meeting on Saturday morning. That way you know that, Hey, look, I’m going to be having my cash success meeting. When I have the most cash flow to work with during that pay period, you went to just like you did before go to Google calendar and name it a cash success meeting.

Okay? You want to uncheck all day. You want to select custom. Then you want to add a customer current, and then repeat this again. Every 14 days. If you want to be aggressive, you can do every seven days if you pay weekly. But I think every 14 days, should give you a good timeframe to look at all of your transactions. So if you’re doing the w seven days, which is a good thing as well, it’ll just will allow you to review all your transactions, but this is not going to end. This is something you want to do forever. Okay? This is a habit you want to get into forever. So unlike the credit, this has so much like the credit success, meaning that you have schedule, um, with a real challenges. This is very important because at some point in the future, your credit is going to be good.

Now, what I want you to do is make sure that moving forward, I can ensure I stay on track with my cashflow and this isn’t going to ever end. And then in your description, this is what you want to put down. So that way you can remind yourself in terms of the key things you’re going to be doing during your cast success meeting. So make sure you get this done, and you add this to your Google calendar, just like you did before and again, before or after your payday is when you want to schedule this. So that way you can make sure you maximize your cash flow. Now customizing your, my cash clarity. So I’ll cover this in some previous modules, but I just want to go in and reiterate some of the key functions that you want to customize. So that way you can get the best bang.

So my cash clarity is what we call it here at MyMoneyEDU, we’re partnered with a external system called Right Capital. And essentially what you want to do is make sure that this is customized. Now the first thing, if you haven’t already done, this is download the mobile app. It’s, it’s really, really simple and easy to use. And then when you’re going out and you’re making those financial transactions and those decisions, you can literally have your app right there on your phone. And then once you’ve downloaded the app, you can go in and look inside of that outside of the app and or on the computer. You’ll be able to know if you have everything in one place, but also want to make sure you create your income categories. So I’m going to get out of this, out of this, this, uh, this slide and show you how to do it again.

But again, when you’re using the mobile app, the more customization you can put into this, the more effective it’s going to be for you to use it. So I want you to make sure you create those income categories. And then also if you have that already create the expense categories from your template. So you sat down, you put all of those template, you put all of those categories in place regarding where your expenses were. We need to put that inside of our monocast clarity app as well. So when that expense occurs, we can say, okay, that was that expense. Or that was this expense, or that was this expense. Additionally, what we want to do is sync all of our accounts. So all of our financial, if you haven’t already sync your financial accounts, especially your accounts that you use with your cashflow in your budget that have all of your financial transactions, like your spending and your income, we need to sync those accounts.

So that way we can hold ourselves accountable. So it’s one thing to put together, the cashflow template. It’s one thing to define your buckets. It’s another thing to open up the separate accounts to do everything that you’ve done. But once we sync the transactions, that’s literally going to give us the clarity that we need to know. Are we on track or are we off track? So when we have our cash past success, meaning we can see where our transactions are going and what is actually going on, and then what we can improve. And then you’ll notice that there’s going to be some areas of opportunity that you’re like, man, I really spend a lot of money in this, or I need to really cut back on this, Oh man, what’s going on with this subscription. And then when I want you to do is audit your actual spending transactions inside of my cash clarity system.

So again, I covered how to do this in a previous module, but if you haven’t already make sure you go in and you audit those transactions. So that way you can train the, my cash clarity system on how you’re spending works. So that way moving forward, when you have your cash success meeting, you’re already good to go. You’re just really looking at your stuff. And then once you have this downloaded on your mobile app, you can just really just pull up your mobile app and to see where you stand at any given point. With you, your particular cashflow in your financial situation. So that’s, that’s really powerful. So reiterating, sinking your accounts. So the thing about the, my cash clarity system is this going to allow you to sync many of the major financial institutions and credit unions. So there’s a couple of institutions that may not be on there, but if you have like a major bank, like a Wells Fargo or Bank of America, Chase, even some of your local credit unions, you, you will be able to sync your information.

You just want to get again, follow the process that I outlined before now, before I kind of hop into distinct accounts in, in more detail. What I want to do is show you a few things based off this with the income categories and the expense categories. So let me get out of this particular slide and I’m going to show you so again, when we get over the right capital with my cash clarity system, when you are here, what you can do was go over to your settings tab. This, this, this settings right here, where you click on this little gear tab, I should say, then you want to go over to settings then right here, this is where you can sync or create your different income categories. So you can see before I’ve created these income categories. So if it’s just you and you just have one job, you would just put paychecks.

But if you want to put any other income here, you can put those incomes here just by adding that income category and the entire title that income category. So we want to know what all of our income is. So when that transaction happens in our cashflow, we can tag it then the same exact thing for our expense categories. So they can come right here and then we can put in. So if we put in here, usually I put in a new Netflix before, but if I happen to have a, let’s just say a random expense with, um, you know, if I want to name my, my, uh, my life insurance specifically, or if I want to name the actual company, let’s say I’m with mass mutual mass mutual insurance. So I can name that specific one. So that way I know. So go through and you’re going to use your cash flow control template that you already created to do this.

So this is really easy. All you’re doing is just type in the expense categories that you’ve already identified, but do this because this is going to make using your mobile app so much more effective and efficient, and then make your cash success meeting a lot more easy and a lot more easy to do and more effective. All right. So let’s get that knocked out and let me get back over here to sync in our accounts. So, um, like I was saying any major financial intuition, you can sync here with My Cash Clarity. Uh, the other thing is, is you want to sync the following accounts without fail. So your bill account, your fixed bucket account, get that sync. So in a previous module, I talked about opening up additional accounts. If you haven’t done that, make sure you do that. If you need to open up those additional accounts, so you can open up additional accounts with whatever financial institution you want.

I gave you a recommendation with Capital Wize. Uh, that’s a company that I work with and, um, they have a really good checking account there and savings, but again, the moral of the story is you want to sync your bill account. Also, you want to make sure you sync your variable account as well. Because again, this is going to be where you’re spending your money on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. So those transactions need to be captured. You absolutely want to make sure you sync your future bucket account. So you can be tracking your, your, your balances towards the goals that you said that you, you wanted to achieve. The other thing is we want to make sure without fail, we sync our emergency fund. If we have not created emergency fund, we need to create a emergency fund, a separate account that’s easily accessible, but hard to access quickly, but we want to sync that account balance.

So that way we know where we stand and we have clarity in case an emergency happens and that we’re building it up where we stand towards our contributions there, then any additional accounts. So these are the major accounts that you absolutely need to sync for your, my cash clarity system to really follow and for it to be effective. However, if you want to sync additional accounts like investment accounts, retirement accounts, loans, property, and insurance, you have that ability to do that as well. And I’m going to show you really quickly how you can do that. So if we’re going back over to the, my cash clarity or the right capital system, what we would do, if we needed to sync any additional accounts is we will come over here to the profile. And then we can literally just hit add account and you have two opportunities.

You can link the account, which means when I link the account, I’m going to be linking the account with my online banking. And that’s going to be the truest up-to-date transaction. Well, the truest balance based off that account, where you stand now, if whatever reason you can’t link that specific account. So let’s just say, I want to link my investments. So I have an opportunity here. So if I wanted to link my 401k, I can just type in my re my, my 401k. So let’s just say I was with TD Ameritrade. So I would just come right here. And then you see TD Ameritrade as a different, a couple of different options. So they have a TD Ameritrade, Inc. Then they have TD bank. If you, if you happen to bank with TD bank, they have TD Ameritrade Institutional. If you have investments with them, if you have a 529 college savings plan.

So there’s different tiers, TD Ameritrade accounts that you would have as an example. So you would just choose the one that fits you. So if it’s a 401k, more than likely, it’s going to be TD Ameritrade Institutional, but you would just select whatever your financial institution is there. Or if you were linking something, not as common like insurance or property, and you wanted to link your investment property or a vacation home, or you wanted to link any other type of just, let’s just say, not even property there, you went to link this property down here. You can put in the current, your current primary home, if you own, or your rent, I would primarily put this if you, you own, but you can still put if you’re renting and then you would just put your primary home name, and then you already started this, and you would just put all of this stuff in here regarding your home.

But the moral of the story is the more information you put in here, even with your loans. So again, you have the ability to put the type of loan here, whether it’s a home loan, car loan, auto loan, and you can manually add the loan or you can link the loan. So again, if you have an auto loan with Capital One, you would just type in Capital One, and then all of your information with Capital One would sync. And that’s how that information would work. So if you have multiple accounts with multiple institutions, typically what happens is they all get sync and you’re able to define them, but that’s a really, really powerful thing that you want to do when you’re staying organized and syncing your accounts, right? So let’s go ahead and keep on moving forward here, reducing and eliminating late fees. So I’m going to cover a couple of things that you can do in your situation to ensure that you can avoid these.

So we already did this, but again, you want to make sure you set up those auto-draft arrangement. So remember in module three, we were able to set this up, but I want to reiterate, this is a really, really great strategy to, to, to completely eliminate any type of late fee or really a late fee from happening and, or a 30 day late. So you want to make sure you set these up because this is going to avoid those bank fees and or late fees. The other thing is, is that you want to understand and maintain any account minimums if applicable what your particular bank. So you want to reach to them and really have a clear picture in terms of, Hey, look, how many, how much money do I have to keep in my account before you guys charged me a fee? And, or do I have to have a certain amount of transactions with you guys in order for me to make sure I maintain a good, good amount of income, because it doesn’t really make any sense to be charged a fee to have your money, how somewhere, if you’re not really getting any benefits out of that.

So you want to make sure you have a clear understanding of where you stand. The other thing is, is you want to open it up free, online checking and savings accounts. So in the last module three, I suggested that you take a look at Capital Wize and Betterment with their checking and their savings options, but you want to look at these free account options and look, and really be clear about, okay, if I open up this free online checking, am I going to have any ATM withdrawal fees? Because this is an online deal. So some banks give you the ability if they’re online to not have any ATM fees or some limit the amount of 18 fees you have. But if you can get one that has no ATM fees, no minimum account requirements or monthly maintenance fees, then that’s okay. Really great option to have.

So again, if you need to open up those other accounts, remember we talked about opening up separate accounts. This is another way that we can do it to ensure that we have those. We don’t have those late fees. The other thing is when opt out of overdraft fees with your financial financial institution. So we’ve done all of this work up to this point, to know where our money is, where our transactions are going to look, have clarity around our money. So it makes no sense to be in overdraft because you now are going to have the control over where your finances are. So just go and knock out, don’t have that and the money isn’t available, then that means that you did a bad job doing your financials, your cash success meeting, but not to beat you up. You’re not going to do a bad job during your cash success.

Meaning you’re going to have your cash assess meeting and know if there’s any money available. And if there’s not, you don’t want to get that overdraft fee. Then you want to link all of your financial accounts to my cash clarity. So I covered that before, but I just want to reiterate having all of those accounts linked is going to give you the ability to literally pull up your mobile app, take a peek at your financial situation at any point, and know where you stand. So make sure you link all of those accounts when you sync them. And that’s what you want to do. Now, when it comes to transaction clarity, is a couple of things you want to do. The first thing is you want to make sure you validate. So you want to, you, you want to look at the transactions and know, okay, was this authorized by me?

Or was this something erroneous? So when you look at your transactions, you’re going to say, Oh, what was this transaction? Oh, okay. I remember this transaction. So you want to make sure you validate your transactions, just to ensure that even with your, your, your auto bill pay, your auto pays, you may have gotten charged over and you weren’t supposed to get charged over. So you need to go and you may need to reach out to them and say, Hey, look, you guys owe me a credit, or you overcharged me. What’s going on here. So validate those transactions. The other thing you want to do is review. And when you review your transactions, you want to make sure that they’re linked to the correct category. So I broke down all that in your cashflow, but I’ll, I want to reiterate when you’re doing this, you want to make sure that all this stuff is linked to the right category.

And then you want to split any transactions that may represent two budgets, and you want to split for accuracy. So let’s just say you shop at Walmart or Target or Costco’s, and you can do groceries there, and you can do, you can do some supplies there. You can do a number of different things in that one store. You want to split that transaction for accuracy. So that way you can know what’s inappropriate category, and then you want to reward yourself. So you find an accountability partner. If you have a spouse, that will be a really good accountability partner. If you’re married and you have somebody else who is going through this process with you, you guys can hold yourself accountable and then reward yourself when you have those small wins. So when you look at the last two weeks and your cash success, meaning, and you see that, Hey, look, we wanted to spend 300 bucks or 400 bucks or 500 bucks.

And we came out at 450, we have an extra 50 bucks. Maybe you can reward yourself with a nice bottle of wine, or maybe a bottle of wine wouldn’t be that nice for 50 bucks. Maybe it could be, but you can just reward yourself with something nice or do something nice. You just put it in your savings, but you want to make sure you do that. Now, when we’re looking at this particular process, one thing I want to show you guys really quickly is how to split your transaction. So give me one second. I’m going to get out of this particular slide and go over to the system and we’re going to click on dashboard. So when we’re looking at our split into transactions, we’re going to go back over to the budget tab. And then we want to click on the actual transaction transactions tab.

And then you’ll see this little arrow right here. So let’s just say I wanted to split the transaction that I went to at Whole Foods. So I would click on this and then you’ll see that I have Whole Foods market, and there’s a description there, but the main thing we want to split is the category. So if I wanted to split between groceries and I wanted to split between, let’s say health and fitness. Now I have this transaction split and it’s split 49.49. Now the other thing we need to make sure we do is that this is equal to this number of the transactions. So let’s just say this amount of food and groceries with $60, and then on health and fitness, I spent 36.85. So I would just type in 36.85, 36.85, and then it would equal the actual same amount.

And then I can hit save. And that’s how I split that transaction as an example. So you want to make sure you do that with those transactions that you go to and you know, those, those locations you go to and they may, they may, you may use that place for one or more things. Okay? So that’s, that’s a really, really powerful thing that we do when we have our transaction clarity and we’re sinking our accounts. Now, the last thing I wanna make sure you guys get is understanding your balance sheet. So what the system system’s going to do is give you the ability to have a balance sheet. And your balance sheet is really your assets minus your liabilities. And this is going to be your net worth. So we’re leveraging our cash and our credit to increase our net worth. We’re not leveraging our cash and our credit to decrease on that work.

So you want to get a snapshot of where you stand. And the goal is to have a positive net worth. Don’t feel bad if it’s negative, when you first identify this, then you want to make sure you sync all of your accounts to determine this. So again, like I was saying before, you can sync all of those accounts in the My Cash Clarity system. So not just your, your cash accounts, but all of your accounts, your personal accounts, your loan accounts, your, if you have home, if you have property, if you have cash investments, link links, all of that. So you can know, again, you want your network to be positive. Then you want to identify your, your, this is going to also help you identify the liquidity. And i.e. This is your emergency fund. This is that life happens account. So you wouldn’t be able to determine, Hey, look, I need to identify how much money I need to have set aside on a monthly basis to ensure if something happens or life happens, I can pull from this, and then you can adjust this to find out what yours needs to be, and I’ll show you how to do that.

And then the last thing is you want to have your budget, I, your cashflow, and this is that tab right here. That’s a part of that balance sheet. And this is what you’re going to use to increase your net worth and your liquidity following the three bucket system. So this is how we’re increased. So again, cash flow and credit are designed to help us build wealth. Or if you don’t have a manage on cashflow and credit, you can go into debt and not be able to build built wealth. So let me show you really quickly, how you can determine your, look, your liquidity. So if we’re going back over to the, my cash clarity, you’ll see that there’s a balance sheet tab. And then once you sync all of your accounts, you’ll notice that it’s going to have your bank account balances and the investment assets, real estate.

If you have any life insurance with values or any other assets, you’ll have them right here, it’s going to give you a total. And then any debts that you have. So only sync one credit card here, just to kind of show you guys. But if you have any mortgages, home loans, student loans, any other debts are going to tell you what your liability is and you’ll get your net worth. But the other thing that’s really, really powerful and cool is liquidity. So I can say, Hey, look, if I put in my rent was $2,500, and this is where this is getting this, this will pull the access is based off my expenses. If I increase my liquidity here, it’s going to tell me, Hey, look, if I’m going to have six months of living expenses, I need to have at least $15,000 saved up. And that’s just, that’s really just including what they have in my budget. So you can determine what this liquidity access access needs to be. So that way you can start saving for that goal. Right? So if you want to understand how to further do that, you were really just come over here to your profile, then click on expenses. And then once you’re under expenses, actually you would click on dashboard, budget and action.

You know, it wasn’t, it was under profile. So when I linked my, when I was just doing some stuff, I’ll put property, and then I put it, I was renting here. And then I put down at the amount that I was renting for. It was $2,500 a month. That’s how they came up with that number. So if you want to get real specific, you can do that. You can add your expenses here. You can add your income here, but the moral of the story with this dashboard that I want you to understand is you can, you can really clearly identify what your liquidity needs to be. So that way, you know, what your target goal is while at the same time, if you just want to set up a specific goal right here for income or for, for cash reserve, you can say, look, I want my cash reserve to be 10,000 or what my cash was, Imma deleted and show you how I did this. So if I want to add a goal and I want to add a cash reserve goal, and I want to make it 15,000, I can do that. And now it’s going to track that. Okay. But the last thing here is we just want to have clarity around all of this and leverage this tool to its maximum potential. So take action. And if you have not downloaded the mobile app makes you get that done, but I am excited for you. And I will see you in the next module.