Don’t Have Time To Improve Your Finances – Then Try These 7 Tips

Have you ever said to yourself, “I don’t have time for that?”

I’ve probably said that phrase to myself a million times over my entire life, and I’ve never thought twice about exactly why I say it sometimes. The truth is almost all of us lead very busy lives.

We have stressful jobs, we have kids who demand our attention, we have bills to pay, and after all of that, we would like to at least spend the rest of our time doing something we actually like to do.

Face it we are all busy but on the same end, we still want to lead prosperous financial lives that allow us to do the things we want. We want to improve our finances but we say we just don’t always have the time.

So in this article, I’m going to give you 7 tips that will show you how to improve your finances by taking as little time as possible.

So if you are committed to improving your finances and don’t have the time to do you read on.

#1 It’s Not Your Priority

To start I want to ask why it is you have no time to improve your finances and that is because you haven’t made it a priority.

I know this may be a bit hard for some of you to accept but I feel when someone says they don’t have time to do something it’s because they haven’t made it a priority to do it.

What’s more, is that you have allowed other priorities to control your life. A good example of this is TV. Don’t get me wrong watching reruns of Friends or Pawn Stars is fun but is it the most valuable thing you could be doing at that exact moment?

My guess is it isn’t.

I also feel when someone says they don’t have the time they are using it as an excuse not to do anything. A good example of this happened recently when I was talking to my brother.

He’s wanted to start a blog for over a year and complains that he doesn’t have any time. I explained to him if he really wanted to do it he would have done it already.

After several conversations with him, he finally did it, and now he writes an article for it almost every week. On top of that, his life is still as busy as it normally is but now he’s writing content for his new blog.

This happened because he made it his priority, not the excuse.

Quick Tip: Before you move on to the next part of this article eliminate the time excuse from your vocabulary because if you don’t improving your finances will never be the priority.

#2 Clearly Define Your Situation

Now that I’ve covered priorities the next step is to clearly define your situation. Back several years ago when I worked in personal finance I would go to a client’s home and sit at their kitchen table and I would look at their entire financial mess and they would basically throw their hands up.

In fact, I came across one particular client who had over 20 credit cards full of debt and when I sat down with her she was literally in tears because she didn’t know which way to turn.

This is the problem when your finances are in shambles things can feel overwhelming and frustrating at times. The reason this happens is that we are looking at our entire problem as a whole.

In order to improve your finances, you need to break down your finances to the exact problem. To do that you need to focus on one very specific problem.

I call this niching down your finances. For example, you might say that one of your problems is debt, and to be more specific credit card debt, and to be even more specific one particular credit card.

Quick Tip: In order to niche down consider breaking your financial problems down 3 layers deep like I just shared above.

By doing this you remove the majority of the mess and focus on a very specific problem. Being focused allows you to put all of your energy towards this one problem rather than spreading it across the entire problem.

#3 Break Things Down To Doable Task

Once you’ve clearly defined your situation you need to break things down into small doable tasks. This task should take no longer than 20 minutes at a time. In the last example, I talked about paying off a credit card so here are some tasks you could do that might only take 20 minutes or less.

Gather all of your credit card debts.

Determine which debt you want to pay off first.

Find a spreadsheet tool to help you organize your debts.

Organize your debts from the lowest balance to the highest.

Determine how much you should apply to this one debt.

As you can see not one of these tasks takes long to do and this is a simple way to go about improving in a small short burst. What’s also great about this is that it allows you to take the time to excuse out of the picture.

When you have things broken down to this small task it also allows you to see the path to success a lot easier.

#4 Automate As Much As Possible

The next step is to consider how you could possibly automate things to make them run smoother thus taking less time for you. When it comes down to it that’s what automation is, a way to get things done for you without you having to give up more of your time.

I recently automated a few things with my finances over the last few months. One is my emergency fund, I recently set up a Capital One 360 Savings Account that automatically withdraws money from my checking account and slowly builds up my emergency fund.

If you would like to learn how to set your emergency fund like this check out my free tutorial right here.

Another area of my finances that I automated was my property taxes. In the state of Ohio, I pay my property taxes every 6 months, which means I pay a big bill every 6 months which can get kind of annoying. So I contacted my county treasures office and ask if I could make it a monthly automatic draft.

That option didn’t save me any more money but I have peace of mind now knowing I don’t have to worry about where this money has to come from every 6 months.

Quick Tip: If putting all of your bills on automatic seem a bit scary to you my good friend Brian over at Simple Financial Lifestyle says start by automating one thing at a time, and then once you get comfortable with that add more.

#5 Get The Right Tools

The next step is to get the right tools and mentors to help you make the process easier for you, and you don’t want just the right tools and mentors but you also want the best tools.

A good example of this is that I wanted to learn how to make my internet business to the next level so I researched all the different tools available and after several weeks of searching, I came across the Internet Business Mastery Academy.

This course didn’t just show me how to build an online business for myself but it also helped me with a lot of the mindset issues that come along with it as well. As a result, I’ve started to see some big increases in the growth of my business all because I invested in the right tools and mentors.

Now don’t get me wrong Internet Business Mastery Academy wasn’t cheap, it still cost me $500 but I realized what I would learn with this course would make me 10 times the money back or more and at the time of this writing, I’ve made back at least the cost of what I’ve paid for the course itself and I know I’ll make a lot more over the next coming months.

If you would like to learn more about the Internet Business Mastery Academy you can read my review here.

So what are some tools and resources you could invest in to help you improve your financial lifestyle, or maybe you could hire a mentor to guide you along the process?

I’m willing to bet there is someone out there that could help you a fast track to your success and help you achieve your goals.

#6 You Have To Be Willing To Hustle

You want to know what separates successful people from their competitors, it’s that they are willing to hustle and get things done. They don’t complain when things get tough or when they get frustrated, they just get things done.

Anyone who is successful didn’t get where they are by sitting on their couch and being lazy.

Nope.

They got there because they kept on pushing and pushing till they achieved their success and even then they kept on pushing.

A good way to explain this is if you’ve ever flown on a public airline. When you’re sitting on that plane and they enter that runway and throttle up they are giving it all they have to get off the ground but once they get off the ground they don’t stop there.

They keep their engine at full throttle until they get to 35,000 feet and then they throttle back a little because they know that they don’t have to have as much power to maintain the altitude as they did when they took off.

Well, the same holds true when you are trying to get to that next level in your financial life as well. You need to hustle for a while till you get off the ground and to an altitude that doesn’t take as much to manage.

#7 Break Down Mental Barriers

Finally, the last step to improving your finances when you don’t have the time is to consider all the mental barriers that may be preventing you from achieving your goals. Often times we can understand our problem very clearly and have all the right tools and mentors but still not achieve success.

Why is this you ask?

It’s because we have a mental barrier that we are not willing to address. These mental barriers can come in all shapes and sizes from things we might be scared to do, to things we just don’t understand how to do.

A good example of this is when I worked in financial services part-time. I loved working with clients and presenting solutions to them but the one thing I hated to do was call people on the phone to set an appointment.

Calling people on the phone terrified me, and more than that I hated being rejected by people I personally knew. This kind of stuff really ate at me and ultimately became the reason I ended up quitting because I could not overcome that internal conflict.

Quick Tip: A good way to break down mental barriers is to start by identifying them. Take out a sheet of paper and list down all the mental barriers you are dealing with right now.

Once you’ve listed out the different mental barriers consider the different ways you could resolve them.

Going back to my earlier example instead of calling people I could have sent out invites through the mail and then followed up with a phone call so when I called them they would already know why I was calling and I wouldn’t have had to explain my situation.

So what are your mental barriers holding you back? Take time to address them now and you’ll more than likely see a big difference in the way you handle your finances.