Introducing FiLO
Following up on my Micro Life Organizer (MiLO), I am pleased to announce my Financial Life Organizer (FiLO) for your consideration. Over the last few months I’ve been reading numerous books on building wealth, and one of the core themes running throughout all of these books has been; if you don’t track your spending, you’ll spend to much. If you spend to much, and have a “high consumption” lifestyle, you’ll never be wealthy. Since I’m not counting on winning the PowerBall lottery anytime soon, and no one in my family will be leaving anything behind when they shuffle off their mortal coil, I decided I needed a better way to track my spending. Keeping track of checks and credit card expenses isn’t completely difficult in this day of on-line banking and instant account checking. But I find that I don’t check these tools on a daily basis. At best I check them weekly, and I can spend a surprisingly large amount of money in a week if I’m not careful! And forget about tracking cash – if I have $20 in my pocket there is no way on God’s green Earth that I’ll remember what the heck I spend it on 24 hours after it’s gone. Given my lack of a fortune coming at the hands of the lottery or a distance, but insanely rich great-great-aunt, and my lack of discipline to capture my monetary transactions in all their various places on a daily basis; I knew I needed a better solution. So I sat down and created FiLO. The essence of a FiLO is a cash, check and credit card register that folds neatly into a 2.75″ x 4.25″ booklet that you can stick in your pocket or carry in your wallet. The goal is to make sure I never have an excuse to not record a financial transaction. And I figured if I find FiLO useful, other people might too…people like you! Of course, you want to see what FiLO looks like; in terms of form if looks exactly like MiLO.  When FiLO is folded, it’s only a bit bigger than a credit card and gives you seven pages to track your financial transactions. The back page is a “Get Excited & Motivated” page and shows you how even saving a tiny bit of money, but doing it on a regular basis, can make you wealthy in your lifetime! FiLO is free for you to use and pass around to anyone you think would get benefit from it. Here’s where to download it: PLEASE NOTE: If you’re printing this PDF with Windows, make sure to select “Page Scaling = None” on the print options when you print out a FiLO or Acrobat Reader will shrink the FiLO down by a few percent and it will not fold properly. This is one of the biggest frustrations people using Windows will have printing out a FiLO for themselves. I hope you enjoy using your FiLO, and I hope it can help you keep closer tabs on your spending. Good luck and good wealth! |
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Excellant and very handy. Thanks
http://pocketmod.com/
This is the origin of this technique. Much more flexible system. Select your own pages, and there’s even an downloadable customizer to create your own pages.
Erisraven,
Actually I saw this method of folding a sheet of 8.5″ x 11″ paper first on the web site: http://pigpog.com/node/1078 under a posting called “Cheapster PDA” which was popular right around the time Merlin Mann’s Hipster PDA really took off in the public conscious.
I thought it was a very interesting way to fold up a little booklet from a single sheet of paper, and I set out to make something more useful for me than just a blank booklet. This MiLO was born and shortly afterword FiLO to track financial transactions.
I’ve checked out the PocketMod site and it’s pretty interesting – MiLO and FiLO work perfectly for me and hopefully for others like myself. There is a place in the world for both I think – they each have plusses and minuses! Keep up expanding the pages available for PocketMod – I really like the auto-genrated Sudoku page – man that’s an addictive game!
Jacob
[...] SuccessMinders [...]
[...] SuccessMinders » Introducing FiLO The essence of a FiLO is a cash, check and credit card register that folds neatly into a 2.75″ x 4.25″ booklet that you can stick in your pocket or carry in your wallet. (tags: Life 5-Star) [...]
[...] SuccessMinders » Introducing FiLO (tags: tools money productivity we) [...]
[...] The Lifehacker blog highlighted a website today that showed you how to create an 8 page personal finance booklet. Print out the PDF document, fold and cut as directed, and voila – instant booklet! [...]
I’d like to see your comments on the fields that you provide in your FILO, esp. “who” and “why.”
Mike,
They’re like a check register. If I spent $5 at McDonald’s then I would put “McDonald’s” in the “who” field. In the “why” field I might put “self-inflict GI distress” or maybe “lunch”
The category field I personally don’t use much – if I write a check I put the check number there. If I was really together and with-it I might try to categorize my expenses, but I’m usually not that organized.
Jacob
[...] The downsides of these web and computer tools–that you need to be at a computer to use them–may be addressed by Filo, a printable expense register. Perhaps this (or any other paper-based expense tracker) could be combined with Pearbudget to avoid having to carry around receipts. [...]
printable blank calendar
Interesting post. I came across this blog by accident, but it was a good accident. I have now bookmarked your blog for future use. Best wishes. Cara Wakelin.
[...] The Lifehacker blog highlighted a website today that showed you how to create an 8 page personal finance booklet. Print out the PDF document, fold and cut as directed, and voila – instant booklet! [...]
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Thanks for the FiLO! My bank (Chase) has stopped handing out free debit sized registers so I looked on Google for a wallet sized template and I’ve now enjoyed the FiLO for a couple of months.