You probably don’t know what this dollar figure represents: $104,215. When you do, you’ll likely be shocked.It’s the average debt carried by the average American.

It covers everything you can possibly owe: credit card debt, auto loans, student loan debt, mortgages, home equity lines of credit, and personal loans.

If you want to be better than average, then the new year is a perfect time to do better. Here’s how.

Budget without being bored

Here’s the first rule of finance: You can’t save money if you don’t know how much you’re spending. That means creating a monthly household budget.

Creating a budget isn’t as difficult, or even as boring, as you think it is. Technology can do a lot of the work for you.

While you can certainly go old-school and create a budget by putting pen to paper, it’s so much easier if you use secure online tools that require just a few keystrokes. There are websites, apps, and programs that handle the drudgery of budgeting for you. They all have slightly different approaches, but the basics are the same: You just type in your income and expenses, and these programs do the math for you. You can even project your savings if you eat one less takeout dinner, or if you refinance your mortgage.

Once you have a solid budget, you can start thinking about goals. But you need to be SMART about it.

How to be SMART

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely. Let’s break it down…

• Specific is the easiest to do. Instead of saying, “I want to lose weight,” you’d say, “I want to walk 10,000 steps during breaks at work and after dinner at night.” That specific goal is easier to meet than a vague one.
• Measurable means setting targets you can easily track. So let’s look back at the goal of losing weight. If you promise to walk 10,000 steps a day, there are apps on your phone that can easily measure that. Likewise, there are apps that can help you manage the money coming in and what you are spending on. You’ll know every day if you’re living up to your own promises.
• Achievable means figuring out how to get where you want to go. You need to develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. For example, even a modest goal isn’t achievable if you set too tight a deadline. Losing 20 pounds in a year is achievable – but in one week, it’s dangerous. You can also say, “I’ll stop buying fancy coffee and a pastry every morning on my way to work and save about $7 a day which amounts to over $1,800 at the end of the year.”
• Realistic means not setting impossibly high goals. If you tell yourself, “I plan to eat only salads every day for a year and never even look at a dessert,” then that’s a specific and measurable goal – but it’s never going to happen. Using the example of buying your morning coffee, we’re not suggesting that you cut out coffee entirely, just the expensive one in the morning. You can have coffee at work and then make it a special treat on the weekend. To be realistic, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work.
• Timely means setting a deadline that’s as soon as you can comfortably hit it. Too many goals come with the vague deadline of “soon.” Even a big New Year’s resolution that takes the entire year isn’t as good as smaller goals each month.