Every once in a while, you should set aside some time to evaluate your financial priorities. You don’t have to do it that often, as they’ll rarely change overnight – and when they do change overnight, you’ll know it.

This is more like a maintenance task you should do to ensure your financial well-being, and it’s something you don’t have to perform more than once a year. If you think you’re due for a mini audit of your priorities, here’s how you can do it.

List Your Financial Goals

The best way to think about priorities is through setting goals. If you understand what it is that you want to achieve with your income, you’ll have a much clearer picture of the things that matter and those that don’t as much.

What are some good financial goals? You can set a goal for how much money you save every month. You can set a goal for how much extra debt you repay every month. You can set budgetary goals such as spending less on certain items, such as fuel or electricity.

Get Your Bearings

It’s funny how you start this by deciding where you want the journey to end, but you have no idea where the journey is starting, right? Well, you probably do have some type of understanding of where all of your money is going, but it’s unlikely it’s a very detailed understanding.

That’s something you should consider changing. And it’s something you should start doing a bit before you sit down to set any priorities because tracking your spending habits over time requires some – time. But by the end of that process, you should know where you’re at, not only where you want to be.

Start Looking for a Path

This is where you’ll be doing the work that helps you figure out your priorities. To achieve any of your goals, you’ll likely have to take actions that might not be too pleasant, things like giving up on dining out, or forgoing the comforts of driving to work and replacing them with a nice but slightly stressful bike ride.

This is where you have to figure out how important these things are to you. Do you want to repay that student loan so badly that you’re willing to use the Money Expert loan comparison tool and find a loan that will let you do it as painlessly as possible? Or, is it more important that you don’t change the type of debt you have, and instead focus on saving by spending less money?

There are several paths for every goal you set for yourself. While you’re looking for those paths, you’ll be able to not only figure out your priorities but plan actions towards making them happen. You’ll have to give something to get something in return, that much should be clear to you.

Implement Your Plan

There are a couple of things you should keep in the back of your mind when implementing the plans you’ve made. You might want to start gradually, with the smallest changes first. Above anything else, you should always have a financial buffer that will help you stay afloat in case you’ve made a decision you end up regretting – something that happens in this thing we call life. Don’t forget that it’s your plan, with your priorities, and you can revisit it whenever you want. But also keep in mind that you might have made some commitments that could be hard to back out from.