… how do you know it ever happened? I remember reading that in a Tom Clancy novel and thinking that really does make a lot of sense, and it is very important in Financial Planning. If you have a plan, but it isn’t written down, how can you be sure you are following the plan? How do you explain the plan to your spouse if it isn’t written down ?
If you don’t write down the cheques you write and the credit card purchases you had, how can you tell if one arrives that you don’t remember is fraudulent or not? If you write it down, you at least have an argument about whether it is real or not.
Records keeping is synonymous with Financial Planning and Financial Reporting and is  an important part of your home finances, and you must keep diligent records. This all must be written down.
This came across my mind when I revisited my mortgage repayment spreadsheet, which I use to figure out just how much longer I have to pay off my house (not as short as I want it to be), but at least because I wrote it down, I now know how long it should be, if I can live within my financial plan. Without that being written down, all I have is, “Maybe some day I’ll have my house paid off”, but to me that is not enough, if I don’t have a real number in my head, I don’t have a goal, and without a goal, it is unlikely I will succeed. If the goal isn’t written down, what does it matter ?
Tomorrow, I’ll do a quick run down of how to set up a simple mortgage repayment spreadsheet, which is a good estimator of how many days you have left to pay off your house.
I write everything down and then keep it in a note book. Nine times out of ten I need to refer to it and go back to my notes.