Are you monitoring or managing your expenses?

I saw an advertisement the other day that showed a bank being robbed while a security guard did nothing, he said he was a only a security monitor there to monitor what was happening not protect it. In a similar way many people today only monitor their expenses and don’t really manage them.

There is a big difference between monitoring spending and managing spending, while there are tools that summarize our spending expenses for us, if all we are doing is looking at this at the end of the month we are not managing our spending.

Let’s use this security monitors’ situation as an example if he were there to protect the bank he would have had a plan in place for when there was a robbery and he would have followed that plan when the robbery started.

If we are managing our finances then we have a plan we follow to make sure our money is directed where we want it to go instead of finding out at the end of the month where it all went.