How does one achieve their personal financial goals? By spending and living smartly!

Before you start thinking the answer to saving is budgeting, my answer is no, I am not talking about that. What you want and what you need is smart spending.

So how do you start? Of course, one should discuss this with a financial advisor in more detail, but if you’re looking to start a game plan today, follow these tips:

Cut Out Comfort Expenses
Create a frugal lifestyle to improve your quality of life.

With a current goal of creating a perpetually frugal lifestyle today, you hope to have a bigger financial goal achieved tomorrow.

The best way to calculate where to cut back expenses is to itemize all your expenses on a spreadsheet for a full six months. This exercise highlights categories in which you could reduce or cut out completely. You’ll be surprised to see what you can cut back.

This exercise is tedious but effective. For those with less patience or time, we recommend using online budgeting applications.

A Debt-Free Grocery Budget
We’re highlighting this category since groceries make up a large portion of a budget.

Our tip? Find out when your neighborhood supermarket or grocer has “coupon and sale” days and plan your shopping around that day. Then only shop at that store only and buy sale items.

When we shop other stores, for personal care or cleaning products, for example, we only buy items that are either on sale or have an available coupon. If we’re lucky, we get both discounts.

Figure out the hook your stores use, and don’t take the bait. Use those hooks to your advantage.

We Love Free or Cheap
With “smart spending planning,” we figure out how to have fun and still reach our financial goals. The operative word here is “planning.”

Before each weekend, establish a plan that requires little to no money. Whether it’s a game night at your house, a free concert in your local park, or a no-cost physical activity such as riding your bike, finding leisure in these activities will help you cut down costs on high-priced activities such as going to the movies or a high-priced brunch.

Increase Your Retirement Contributions
If you have a job where you filled out a W-2, try to maximize your 401(k) contribution so you can get the maximum retirement match from your employer.

If you work for yourself, you will have no company retirement match. So, myself for example (self-employed), I take our profits (not revenue) and contribute to a Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) IRA.

All Revenue Goes Back to the Business
Any revenue the business earns goes back into the business. This is to grow the business so that it will someday support myself.

Hey, you have “extra money,” where will it go? If your extra money doesn’t have a pre-determined destination, there’s a risk it will be spent unwisely.

Some financial advisors call it “giving up a little today to have more tomorrow.” I call it smart spending.

This is how we’ll achieve our financial and life dreams.

Anthony Rivieccio is the founder & the CEO of The Financial Advisors Group, celebrating its 20th year as a fee-only financial planning firm specializing in solving financial problems. Anthony, a recognized financial expert since 1986, has been featured by many national and local media including: Klipinger’s Personal Finance, The New York Post, News12 The Bronx, Bloomberg News Radio, BronxNet, Norwood News, The West Side Manhattan Gazette, Labor Press Magazine, Financial Planning Magazine, 1010 WINS radio, The Bronx News and The Bronx Chronicle. For financial assistance or a FREE 2016 Investment Analysis. Anthony can be reached at (347) 575 5045.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.