When I first started exercising on a regular basis, there were many things that could throw me off of my training routine. It could be that the weather was wrong, or I forgot my clothes, or my friend canceled or a number of other reasons.

Then one day I decided to sit down and look at the entire process and see where the decisions were made and where things could go wrong. After this, I removed any point in the process where I could stumble. For instance, just in case a friend didn’t show up, I always brought my iPod. Or if I forgot my clothes, I made sure that I always had extras in the locker room. This way, my training became pretty much automatic.

The same can be applied to the Money Marathon.

1. Set up as many accounts as you need – Look for banks that make it really easy to open up as many accounts as you want. Some banks let you open up a new account online with a click of a button.

2. It’s proactive saving – You should take money and put it towards your savings before you have to worry about bills, your mortgage and other expenses.

3. Look beyond savings accounts – You can set up automatic transfers to your savings accounts. Most of investments companies have automatic withdraws and transfers also.

4. Automatically reinvest – Set up your accounts so that any interest or income you receive from investments and savings are automatically reinvested for you. This way you will start compounding your investments and they will grow at a faster rate.

5. Continue paying after paying off debt – If you are paying off your credit cards, here is a good strategy to save money. After you pay them off, keep on making the payment, but now redirect it towards your p2p lending account on Lending Club, with a small portion going towards your Fun Fund.

6. Predict unexpected costs – If you drive a used car, plan for having one major breakdown per year that’ll cost $500 and set aside the money. Set up an emergency account to automatically handle any kind of a cost that might otherwise throw you off your Money Marathon plan.

The goal of automating your Money Marathon is so that human nature or any emergency will not appear in the middle of it and stop you from crossing the finish line. How is your training progressing thus far?

Continuing with our Money Marathon series, today we’ll go over something that is more fun instead of more work.

When training for a race, it is essential to maintain at least 100% desire to go out there and train. One of the experts once said that if you ever feel yourself falling below this threshold you should immediately take a week off from training and just relax. This would allow you to reenergize and be ready again to train with full enthusiasm.

I’ve turned this around for the Money Marathon and call it the Fun Fund. Everybody should have a fun fund to make personal finances more fun and to have a way to reenergize your desire to continue with the Money Marathon.

What is a Fun Fund? A Fun Fund is an account you set up to hold money that you can do anything fun with and feel zero guilt about it. Do you want to buy that big toy? Do you want to take that weekend trip? Do you need that gizmo you wanted since childhood but never received?

You can use the Fun Fund money to do any of the above.

How do you set up a Fun Fund? You should set up the Fun Fund as a savings account with no restrictions. Look for an account that has no minimums, no limits on how many times you deposit or withdraw money, and lets you set up withdrawals from your other accounts. Once you have set up this account, write down the account number and the transfer number and keep it handy.

How and when do you contribute to your Fun Fund? As a general rule, you should add to the Fun Fund whenever you have any kind of windfall. Let me give you some examples:

• If you receive a 4% raise at work, take .5% and automatically redirect it to towards your Fun Fund and the rest to your investments account

• If you sell used stuff on Craigslist or eBay, and accept payments via PayPal, you can transfer this money into your Fun Fund

• If you find a way to cut 5% of your monthly costs, then redirect 4% to your investment accounts and 1% to your Fun Fund

• If you’re refunded $400 on your taxes, enter your Fun Fund account number to have the money sent straight there

Why set up a Fun Fund? Setting up a Fun Fund will allow you to be more enthusiastic about savings, investing, cutting costs and so forth, because you’ll be sending a portion of the proceeds to your Fun Fund. Another big reason to do this is that you will not destroy your budget by making impulse purchases, because you know that you can always buy something that you really want from your Fun Fund. Having this ability to reward yourself will help keep you on track with your money marathon training without derailing your efforts.

I learned this technique from Brian Tracy. It applies to a lot of decisions that we have made in the past and it’s especially applicable to your Money Marathon. Zero-based thinking is not about changing your mind after you have made a decision that you’re having some second thoughts about. It’s about learning from the past and taking definite action.

The question that Brian Tracy asks is: Knowing what I now know, would I ever make this decision again?

The answer to this question is either yes or no. If yes, continue with that same decision and develop it further. If no, then you ask: how can I get out, and how fast?

When training for a race, you end up spending a lot of time on training or other activities that take you away from your normal daily life activities. To free up time for training, I had to ask this same question about many of the things that I was habitually giving time to. Knowing what I now know, would I ever start these habits again? After going through different areas of my life, I ended up cutting many things completely and reducing the time that I spend on others.

For your Money Marathon, you need to ask the same question to achieve the results that you have set for yourself. Look at every part of your life that involves money, finance or work and ask yourself: knowing what I now know; would I ever go into this again?

Here’s a sample of questions for you to consider:

• Knowing what I now know, would I make the investments that I’m invested in?

• Knowing what I now know, would I take this job? Or would I hold out for something that I enjoyed better?

• Knowing what I now know, would I save my money in the bank? Or would I go for bigger returns by lending out it with p2p lending?

• Knowing what I now know, would I continue leaving the thinking about my money to other people? Or would I become actively involved in my own personal finances?

If any of these questions are answered with “yes,” you should ask yourself, ”How I can opt out, and how fast?” This will free up many of your resources to let you focus on making better decisions and winning your Money Marathon.

In order to achieve any big goal, such as running a marathon, or winning at your Money Marathon, the actions have to be broken down into small steps – the smaller the steps the better. Breaking the goal down into daily action items is better than having weekly or monthly steps.

When I was training for a half marathon, I adopted and used a program that broke training down to a ½ hour per day during the initial weeks. The ½ hour is a unit that was easily measurable, easily achievable and binary. By binary I mean it has a yes/no answer to the question, “Was the task completed?”

You should do the same with your approach to your Money Marathon. Break it down to a unit that you can easily measure, achieve and report on. Initially you’ll need to focus on your daily habits. How much do you save per day? How much do you invest per day? How much do you spend? What are your daily food, transportation, housing and other costs? How much do you pay towards credit cards per day?

In race training, because of the daily focus, you can spot trouble areas right away. You can prevent serious injuries and find areas where you might be stuck. If you only focus on big goals and half a season goes by, and only then do you notice a trouble area, it might be too late to even compete in the race.

For your Money Marathon you can monitor your daily money health and adjust your finances accordingly. It is also easier to focus on saving and investing a very small amount per day than having to come up with a huge amount at the end of the month. On Lending Club, for example, you can add funds to your lender account daily, and you can reinvest P2P loan payment proceeds daily in $25 increments.

Thinking about your big goals and breaking them down into small chucks allows you to see how you can achieve a much bigger goal which otherwise might have seemed overwhelming.

Once you have figured out where you are starting from and what resources you have to work with, the next step is to figure out where you want to be. In real running races, you would pick your next race to be a stretch from what you have done before, and have bigger goals for the long term such as a marathon or even the Ironman competition. For your money race, you need to have small goals that will lead you to the ultimate Money Marathon.

There are several ways to do this.

The progressive way is to start small and increase your goals by small amounts each time. This might entail setting it as a goal to increase your income by 10% each year or to increase your savings from your current 5% to 10% by putting this amount into P2P loan portfolios on Lending Club, for example. With the progressive plan you take small incremental steps towards something bigger or better.

With the think from the future way, you start with the end in mind and work backwards. Your final Money Marathon might be to retire as a millionaire. So you set that as the goal, calculate how much time you have to work with between now and then, and breakdown how much you need to earn, save and invest between now and then to reach this goal.

In physical running it helps a lot to determine where you want to be. Do you want to be a casual runner that once in a while runs a charity race and otherwise just runs for fun and exercise? Or do you want to be racing the ultra marathons in a couple of years? Once this is determined it will make other choices and decisions easier, such as how much time to devote to this and what needs to be done.

For the Money Marathon, you need to look at your life and determine if you just want to approach the money race in a casual way, spending only a couple of hours a week on it, or if you are going for that ultra Money Marathon and will dedicate time to it every day. The choice is yours, as are the results that follow.