Consistency is the key to financial management and therefore to becoming prosperous.
There are no secrets or special formulae to gaining mastery over your finances. Just focussing now and again on keeping a financial record of your spending, is not going to cut it. The problem with consistency is that we are not really used to it. Most people have a mindset or expectation of wanting instant results. They expect to become prosperous by magic almost.
Most of what we read about highly successful people is about studying their habits. Studying and repeating the habits of successful people will get you the same results as the successful people themselves. The problem is that most unsuccessful people lack discipline and therefore are unable to be consistent. To become prosperous requires correct discipline.
After practising any discipline for a period of time most people start to get tired and fed up, especially if they are not getting their expected results.
If lack of discipline has been your comfort zone, then practising new habits requiring discipline will feel very unfamiliar and maybe even troublesome. But perseverance will enable you to ultimately triumph. When practising new skills people often feel a sense of internal resistance and this is entirely natural.
If you keep practising the habits, your thinking will eventually catch up and you will find that you enjoy new attitudes and the new skills become more natural to you. It’s much the same as top sportsmen who endlessly spend hours and hours practising their skills. They know that on days when they are mentally below par or under severe pressure in a competition, the new skills will be more habitual to them and they will not need to think about how to carry them out. The skills have become grooved or ingrained in their psyche and therefore part of them.
This is the key to acquiring new habits which are the habits of successful people. Willingness to go to the lengths necessary will bring you the success you desire, in whatever endeavour you choose.
At the outset keeping a spending record feels like a futile thing to do in order to achieve prosperity. Most people, who struggle financially, fantasize that the answer to their dilemma is to acquire a large sum of money. But, if you think about it, even if they get a large sum of money, their old habits of indiscipline will see it eroded. Discipline skills must be learned and ingrained no matter what our present financial status may be. Practising mental discipline is a skill that must be acquired, otherwise whatever money we presently have will eventually eroded. If you think about it, if you are not practising financial disciple habits, then by inference you must be practising indiscipline which can only become more prevalent in your life.
Start with simple steps and keep it simple. Keeping your ‘numbers’ is as simple as it gets.
As the old Chinese proverb states, ‘the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step’.

Author's Bio: 

Gerry Savage is an online author of articles on self development and in particular on money management leading to prosperity.
He is the author of an eBook, 'Change your Future' showing in easy to understand steps and actions how it is possible to change your thinking and therefore your future
See his Free eBook at http://gerrysavage.com