Rather than just crunching numbers and spitting out a budget, The Simple Dollar blog suggests taking a step further back to examine your relationship to money.
The article offers up 20 thought-provoking questions and suggests using a journal to record your responses and thoughts:
“it’s almost like self-therapy – you’re digging through the relationship
you’ve built up with money throughout your life and exposing the areas
that really need work.”
The questions including asking about ways you’ve attempted to control your spending in the past, how money is involved with your relationship to those closest to you, and asks where you want to be in five years and how you want to get there financially. Some of those questions are pretty challenging, but if you take the time to work through the list it could provide a pretty solid roadmap for where you’re going financially.
Reflections on Money: 20 Valuable Questions to Ask Yourself [The Simple Dollar]