Just my own story, not advice. Everyone’s situation is different.
At some point, almost every person thinks: something in my life has to change.
At some point I thought it too. Why then? I don’t know. Why not earlier? I don’t know either. I can’t say what pushed me. I just caught myself asking: where am I, and why am I here? And the answer was clear: something has to change. Definitely.
And right there, the mess started. What to change? How? Where do I even begin? What would be my very first step? And the question that bothered me most: what does “change” even mean? For me, and not for anyone else.
Because it’s different for everyone. For one person it’s a better-paid job. For another it’s a different country, or their own business, or simply more free time. Stop for a second and ask yourself: what would it be for you?
It’s not an easy question. I think many people can’t answer it, because we are told the answer before we ask. Ads and “get rich quick” gurus keep showing the same picture: huge amounts of money, expensive cars, big houses, yachts, throwing money around. Ask almost anyone what success is, and I think you’ll hear that picture, not their own.
I didn’t have my own answer either. It only came very recently, when I stopped thinking and started doing small things. Then I understood what success means for me: to live where I want to live, to do what I like to do, and to be able to live from it, calmly. Even if it never brings millions. I’m not there yet. But for the first time, I know what I’m walking toward.
And I’ve noticed something about people, myself included: a change makes you want the next one. You finally get the phone you wanted, and a year later you’re looking at a newer model. First any car will do, then you want a better one. It’s not good or bad. It’s how we work.
So a change is rarely a single jump. It’s more like a path. And any path begins with one question I couldn’t skip, and that I have to answer as it really is, not as I’d like it to be: where am I right now?
Where I actually was
After that New Year thought, I didn’t change anything. Not for months.
I did change something in my head. I walked around imagining that I had already started, that I was already successful. But the real start kept sliding. You come home from work, you’re tired, you rest a bit: I’ll begin tomorrow. Tomorrow is a day off, and a new video has just come out: I’ll watch it, and then I’ll start. Then one more video. Then another. And the day is gone, and I haven’t started.
There’s one thought I kept meeting everywhere, in motivational posts, short videos, groups: people who move and people who don’t differ in one thing, action. It’s everywhere, I can’t even tell you where I first heard it. It sounds too simple. But it stayed with me.
And then, in April 2025, I started. Why April? I still don’t know. Maybe that thought finally got to me. Maybe it was something much more boring, like I’d watched everything there was to watch and had nothing left but to do something. I won’t pretend I can say. And I think that’s the real problem: I can’t tell what makes one day different from all the days before it.
The first thing I wanted to do was track my money. I wanted to see where it goes.
The first tool, and the first trap
When I decided to start, Excel was the first thing that came to my mind. I already knew it a little. But I wanted to find out what is actually best for tracking finances, and that’s how I came across Notion.
I installed it right away and started watching videos on how to use it. And of course, videos on how to build a cool finance page in it. Then I realized it was too hard for me for now. First I’d have to learn Notion itself, and that was pushing my actual tracking further and further away. So I went back to Excel, because it was clearer to me.
And there it was: an empty table. Income, expenses, okay. But all of it has to be calculated somehow, right? So I started looking for formulas. And slowly the videos led me somewhere else: to cool tables. So I started making cool tables, and redoing them again and again.
At the same time, I was writing down my income and expenses right away.
But I kept finding new videos, with even cooler tables, more informative and more convenient, or so they seemed to me. And I kept redoing mine. Slowly, I started opening it to fill it in less often, and to redo it more often.
My recording was irregular, too. I never picked one fixed day to sit down and write down all my income and expenses. I could have lost something or forgotten something. I wasn’t calculating anything yet, I was just collecting data. And with every new table, it all got more and more confusing.
I kept records like this for a couple of months, I think. I didn’t note exactly. And somewhere in that time I noticed something: the same payments kept showing up, month after month. My subscriptions. I knew what each one was, but seeing them in one place, with a price next to each, I saw for the first time where some of my money goes. I cancelled a few. Not all of them. Outwardly, nothing changed.
In the end it quietly faded. I can’t even say what stopped first: the recording or the redoing. Why? I don’t know for sure. Maybe I simply got tired of it. Maybe the motivation ran out. And maybe this, which only occurred to me now, while writing this: back then, when I didn’t feel like doing it, I didn’t. I didn’t force myself. I’m not sure that’s the reason. But it might be.
The second try
The idea didn’t leave me. So I decided to try again.
This time, a plain table of income and expenses that I build myself, step by step. No downloaded template, no perfect design. Someone told me: make it work first, then make it better. I didn’t know that back then.
What’s different this time? Let me be straight about it, even if it’s not pretty. Now there are moments when I force myself. Back then I didn’t. Sometimes I don’t feel like writing or moving forward, or something more interesting pulls me away, and I tell myself: no, do this first. And more often than not that turns into a few hours of work.
It’s the same with the push-ups and the plank. I can do 30 or 40 push-ups. But I know myself: after a week my brain would start pushing back, because it’s hard. So I chose 10 push-ups and a 30-second plank. A minute, no more. So easy that there’s nothing to resist. In the beginning there were days I didn’t want to, a few in a row, and I did it anyway. Now it’s less often, but some days the brain still says: let’s skip today, the weather’s bad. For a while now, if I skip it, I feel uncomfortable.
Will it be the same with tracking my money? I don’t know yet.
It seems to me that people split into two groups: those who give up after a failed try, and those who try again. I’d like to be in the second. Every failed try tells you something, and the next one can start a bit smarter.
I’m not sure everything will go the way it looks in my head right now. But I’ll keep taking small steps, and I believe they will lead me somewhere.
Maybe one day I’ll sit with friends and tell this story the way old films do: “It all started a while ago…” I hope that day comes.
If you’ve tried something and it faded, what was it? And would you try again?
Related on FinCamp: the guide Before you invest: where do you stand today? explains the first step in plain words. You can also look at the calculators.