What You Need To Manage Your Money
With record bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures and prices skyrocketing, it’s more important now than ever before to properly and effectively manage your personal finances.
Statistics show that most people could manage very well on the income they have now if they were able to keep their bills and expenses within their income. Sadly, too many people do not understand how to do this or how to recover once they have overextended themselves.
Personal Money Management is not a one step process. Simply having a budget in place or keeping up with your checking account isn’t enough. You need to follow a set process that covers several aspects of money management. Here are the basics of this process:
Set Your Goals
Most people think of setting goals as strictly long-term like retirement and college for the kids. While these are very important goals they are just the beginning. You need to decide what you and your family want your future to be and make all financial decisions with that in mind. This could include things like setting aside money for an annual vacation, replacing your car or home repairs.
Find Out Where You Stand Now
It’s absolutely necessary that you know what you have coming in and what you have going out. While a pre-set budget form is best to accomplish this you can do it on a piece of notebook paper. Just right down your bills and expenses in one column and your income in another. Then add them up and subtract your expenses from your income. You will know at a glace if you have money problems.
Develop A Budget You Can Live With
There are literally thousands of budget sample forms available and most are very effective. However, many have as many as 50 categories of expense items you must keep up with to make it work. This requires entirely too much time and effort and are usually abandoned within a few days or weeks. Find a simple budget with very few categories and once set up only requires your attention for a few minutes on payday.
Cut Expense In Every Budget Category You Can







