Finances are a crucial part of our day-to-day lives. However, most of us lack proper financial plans or proper systems to aid in our financial management.
Others completely neglect their financial life and let it slide. Drifting around and before they realize it, they are buried in heaps of debt and lost a sense of purpose.
Financial planning keeps you on track to your good financial well-being.
Keeping tabs on your income, assets, liabilities, taxes, how leveraged you’re, and your spending habits form the basis of a good financial plan.
Steps For Effective Personal Finance Management
image: Steps in effective financial management and planning
Step 1: Assess Your Current Financial Situation
Your income is the strongest wealth-creation tool. We need to free it from unwarranted deductions and unnecessary expenses to speed up our wealth-creation journey.
A. Evaluate your income and expenses
How much are you earning in a month? List all your sources of income and decide what you’ll do with every penny before it hits your account.
Do this in a manner that receiving payments only begins a financial allocation chain. You’re telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.
What of unexpected earnings, such as bonuses and gifts? Set up a system for such amounts to go into debt repayment or your investment portfolio. By all means, grow your net worth.
Use apps to aid in tracking your expenses. This will help you budget better with every month that goes by as you get to understand yourself better; by painting your financial picture.
B. Review Your Assets and Liabilities
image:Assets and Liabilities comparison
Track your holdings vs your liabilities. Assets are income-generating holdings independent of your job, such as stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.
Liabilities, on the other hand, smoke your money. For example, owning a car provides comfort and convenience, but can be costly. As expenses such as gas, insurance, and maintenance compound to huge amounts.
Track your net worth quarterly, at the very least. Net worth is simply your assets less your debts. Aim for living a debt-free life for the mental peace it gives you, knowing your family is secure, and no one has a claim on your assets.
C. Understand your spending habits and financial goals
What do you spend your money on and how does that align with your goals and objectives?
Most of our expenses are cyclical and thus easy to miss the finer details. Develop a payday routine that will help you keep track of your expenditure.
Match your expenses with your financial and life goals. This makes money a tool at your service, thus leading to a fulfilling life.
Step 2: Create a Realistic Budget
image: Budgeting guide and net worth tracker
If you’re a fan of Dave Ramsey, you probably have heard the phrase “Stop blowing money like you’re in Congress, live on a budget.”
A budget is essential for wealth creation. It outlines your spending, which reflects your values.
There are two approaches to staying on budget:
Track your every coin.
This is what I’d recommend for those starting out.
With the use of budgeting apps, it’s possible to track your expenditure. You feed in your expenses as they occur and after a certain duration, you can review and see how much you’re spending and on what.
After we’ve known how much we spend, we can now graduate to the second level
Allocating Funds To Expenditure Buckets.
With our data on expenses such as food, transport, entertainment, investments, etc., we can set up budgets for each expense type.
For every transaction we make, we shall be drawing money from the respective bucket.
For example, when buying drinks with my friends on our night out, I’d draw from the entertainment bucket or food bucket when buying groceries.
Thus the balance will determine how much I’ll spend next time as am in control.
Once one bucket runs out of money, you have two options. You can either allocate more money to it next time or wait until your next paycheck. It’s up to you to decide.
The balance communicates to you whether you’re on track or overspending.
Define your financial goals
What are your financial aspirations?
Breaking down the targets into smaller chunks makes it easier to stay on track and watching your progress breeds motivation, making you stay on it.
Incorporate the broken-down mini-goals into your budgeting process.
Allocate funds for savings and investments
As you stay on budget, a part of your earnings is yours to keep. Save it and assign to it a task that will bring you more money or improve your productivity.
Explore investment opportunities such as shares, treasury bonds, bills, real estate or even running your own business.
No money’s too small to get you started on the right track. All you need is a good plan and adopting the right investment philosophy.
C. Monitor and adjust your budget regularly
After setting up various expenditure budgets, you’ll notice that sometimes you’ve got a lot of month left at the end of your money. And other times, there is surplus cash in some of the expenditure budgets set.
Keep adjusting the allocations until you’ve got figures that work for you.
Budget monthly as your needs will vary from month to month thus, you need to keep track of allocations even after setting them on autopilot.
IV. Step 3: Reduce and Manage Debt
Debt is a sword that should be handled with care. When used right, it’s a powerful wealth-creation tool. When misused, it buries you in financial misery.
Good Debt Vs Bad Debt
In your net worth improvement quest, increasing your assets and reducing your liabilities is the ultimate path to follow.
If you must get into debt, let it be to increase your productivity (good debt) and not fund your consumption (bad debt).
Develop a debt repayment plan.
As much as we can use debt to increase production, we shouldn’t let it rise faster than our income or assets, as that’s a path doomed for disaster.
We should, therefore, develop a debt repayment plan that best suits our needs.
Debt Snowball.
List all your debts from the smallest to the largest. Make the minimum payment on all the debts except the smallest.
Channel the surplus cash towards repaying the smallest debt. Once it’s settled, funnel all the money you used to pay debt 1 into debt 2. All along, making the minimum payment on all the debts remaining. Roll the amounts to the next debt once you settle one.
Debt Avalance.
List your debts based on interest rates and payoff debts with the highest interest rates first.
We recommend the debt snowball as it breeds motivation, watching your debts disappear one after the other.
How to avoid future debt
Only borrow to increase productivity.
Build a sinking fund for the foreseeable future expenses, such as weddings.
Always pay cash.
V. Step 4: Build an Emergency Fund
An emergency fund is the rubber on the shoe that keeps you going. It’s an ‘insurance’ cushioning you against sliding back into debt.
How Much Money Should Be in Your Emergency Fund?
A sizeable amount to cover your living expenses for 3 to 6 months. This doesn’t have to be your total salary, although that would greatly help, just enough to pay for your basic expenses such as housing, food, utilities, and transport.
C. Strategies to save for emergencies
We recommend you do this as fast as possible, preferably in three months.
You can allocate more funds as time goes by to keep growing your emergency fund until it’s able to cover an entire year’s worth of expenses.
Automate to make the process painless and always replenish your emergency fund after drawing from it.
VI. Step 5: Invest for Your Future
A. Importance of investing for long-term financial goals
Secure your financial future by investing in stocks, treasury bills and bonds, cash-flowing real estate, and business.
This future proves your earning potential as it provides an income independent of your day job.
B. Understand different investment options
‘‘All investments are good, we only have bad investors.’’ -Robert Kiyosaki.
Familiarise yourself with the available opportunities and how best you can take advantage of them.
Always remember, increasing your income will make the process far much easier.
The Stock Market
Trading in publicly listed companies is a great way to grow your investment capital.
You can achieve this by owning individual stocks or ETFs traded in various markets.
You’ll need to invest a considerable amount of time in learning financial analysis and business analysis of companies you’d want to own.
However, always remember: Keep it Stupid and Simple.
Treasury Bills and Bonds
Treasury bills are short-term debt by the government to fund its expenditure, while Treasury bonds are long-term debt instruments to help the government run its projects, such as infrastructure.
Either way, it’s the government’s promise to you that her future citizens will pay you back your money plus interest. Either through taxation or inflation.
Real estate
Own a positive cash-flowing piece of real estate and hire reputable property managers to help you run it. Aim at raising at least a 50% down payment to ease the process.
Business
You can similarly run a scalable business on the side to help you increase your income, thus enabling you to invest more.
C. Assess your risk tolerance and investment timeframe
Many people will say they’re risk tolerant till they lose a thousand bucks.
No one enjoys losing money. However, we can tailor our investment portfolio to suit our financial needs and match our risk tolerance levels.
For starters, the best investment policy is the one that meets your present needs.
Our needs, however, vary based on our responsibilities and age.
For example, for a 70-year-old John, it’d be conventional wisdom to have 30% of his holdings in stocks and 70% in bonds.
If we probe deeper, we realize he is healthy and has no one else to take care of. Therefore, he has no business with having 70% of his holdings in bonds.
The point is, no one general advice cuts across for everyone, rather each one has to tailor their investments to their most pressing needs.
VII. Step 6: Plan for Retirement
How do you want to retire? Like a king on a private island or living a modest life?
It doesn’t require large chunks of money to retire comfortably. For example, to live on USD 30,000 a month, you need a USD 3,000,000 investment giving you a 12% return net of tax, which is doable.
We can achieve this by distributing your investments in bonds and stocks.
D. Regularly review and adjust your retirement plan
I must admit, this is going to take you a considerable amount of time. And therefore is critical to assess both your progress and how your needs are changing continuously.
As you near your retirement age, you’ll need a consistent flow of income as your energy and active income levels would be dwindling, therefore having a sizable dividend or bond portfolio would be helpful.
Step 7: Continuously Educate Yourself
A. Importance of financial literacy
Personal finance is a crucial part of your life. It hasn’t been more important than now.
With the emergence of meme bitcoins and trader communities ignoring the basics of fundamental investing and out to outdo the ‘’big whales’’.
You, however, should know better and continuously educate yourself. Feed your mind with the right mental diet. Books on personal finance, as well as blogs, are helpful.
Attend financial workshops and seminars and stay informed of trends and recent developments in the financial sector.
Your financial well-being is your responsibility. Take charge.
In Conclusion
The 7 Steps to effective financial management are:
Access your current financial situation.
Create a realistic budget.
Reduce and manage debt.
Build an Emergency Fund
Invest for your future.
Retirement plan.
Continuously educate yourself.
Personal finance is a spiritual journey of self-discovery and mastery. With every step you take towards the betterment of your finances comes elevation to a new level you never thought was possible.
Take on the challenge and use these steps as a guidance system toward your new future of infinite possibilities.
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