While it is easy to set money goals, many people struggle to stick to them and stay motivated in the long term. To help make it easier to track your money goals, we’ve put together a list of five simple yet effective tips.

Split your goals into smaller milestones

Setting milestones is a great way to stay on top of your financial goals. Instead of tackling huge savings goals head-on, dividing them into smaller milestones makes things seem much more achievable. This will also help keep you motivated as you gradually complete smaller milestones one after the other. Achieving multiple smaller milestones can be much more satisfying than a single goal that takes forever to reach.

Keep track of your expenses

One of the easiest ways to help track your money goals is monitoring your spending habits and expenses. Oftentimes, we overspend on items that we may not necessarily need without realizing how much it is affecting our finances. Therefore, having a convenient tool that tracks your expenses can be extremely helpful nowadays. There are many applications such as Mint and Money Manager that can help you easily track your spending and see exactly where your money is going every month.

Stick to a budget

Aside from tracking your expenses, you should also set a monthly budget that you can stick to consistently. Of course, there’s no use setting a budget that is almost impossible to stick to, and having a massive budget defeats the purpose. Therefore, you should create a budget that is strict but realistic if you are careful with your money.

Automate your savings

By setting up automatic contributions to your savings account, you’ll be saving money every month automatically.  This way a certain amount of money remaining from your checking account is automatically transferred to your savings account. Automating your savings means that you are reducing the opportunities to spend potential savings unnecessarily.

Establishing an emergency fund

While you may be on track to reach your money goals, there is always a chance that you encounter an unexpected financial bump in the road. So, it is almost a necessity to set up an emergency fund to still be able to reach your goals if something goes wrong. Usually, you will want to save up at least three months’ worth of expenses in case of any unforeseen issues or emergencies.