Remember those financial goals you make back at the beginning of this year? With the year drawing to an end, and with Fall just ahead, it is a good time to revisit your financial goals. It is also a good time to check if any of those goals have gone awry. Here are some financial must-do things or this Fall.
Create an emergency fund
This September has 5 Fridays, which means an extra week’s worth of paycheck! If you are getting this huge benefit, consider to use this bonus to start building your emergency fund. Even small amounts of emergency fund can help you during times of car repairs, medical expenses, unexpected emergencies, and more. A good place to start doing this from is your high-yield online savings account.
Already have a good enough emergency fund nest? Then use that bonus towards paying your mortgage debt or credit card debt, or even planning to use it next year.
Oh and by the way, this December has 5 Fridays as well!
Increase your retirement savings
Are you maximizing your PF or Provident Fund? If so, this is a good time to consider making an increase to this contribution.
The minimum goal for provident fund should be to contribute enough to get any employer in the future to match your current company’s offer. If it is possible, boost your contribution by 10% or even by 15% by the end of this year.
You can contribute up to a certain amount per year, and this amount is tax-deductible. If you are older than 50, you can add another certain amount to build up your retirement egg nest.
Save something for those shopping splurges
Special days for encouraging shopping sprees and increased consumerism are many. There are days like Black Friday when you are bombarded by huge discounts and price offs. Of course people buy! Even those who are not in the habit of splurging find it hard to stop themselves.
At times like these, what you can do is arrange an automatic weekly transfer of a certain amount to your savings account from the beginning of September. Thus, when Black Friday does come, you’ll have enough funds to buy things.
Understand that the huge discounts only set you up for buying something big or expensive, which mitigates the discount cost for the sellers.
Use technologies to pay off debt faster
Why not let technology help you out? For instance there are tools which let you see when you shall be debt-free based on your current assets and liabilities. Using these can fine-tune your finances in ways would not have imagined possible!
Monday, February 22, 2021
Goals Of Financial Management - 4 Personal Financial Goals
Monday, February 1, 2021
Goals Of Financial Management - 4 Personal Financial Goals
Remember those financial goals you make back at the beginning of this year? With the year drawing to an end, and with Fall just ahead, it is a good time to revisit your financial goals. It is also a good time to check if any of those goals have gone awry. Here are some financial must-do things or this Fall.
Create an emergency fund
This September has 5 Fridays, which means an extra week’s worth of paycheck! If you are getting this huge benefit, consider to use this bonus to start building your emergency fund. Even small amounts of emergency fund can help you during times of car repairs, medical expenses, unexpected emergencies, and more. A good place to start doing this from is your high-yield online savings account.
Already have a good enough emergency fund nest? Then use that bonus towards paying your mortgage debt or credit card debt, or even planning to use it next year.
Oh and by the way, this December has 5 Fridays as well!
Increase your retirement savings
Are you maximizing your PF or Provident Fund? If so, this is a good time to consider making an increase to this contribution.
The minimum goal for provident fund should be to contribute enough to get any employer in the future to match your current company’s offer. If it is possible, boost your contribution by 10% or even by 15% by the end of this year.
You can contribute up to a certain amount per year, and this amount is tax-deductible. If you are older than 50, you can add another certain amount to build up your retirement egg nest.
Save something for those shopping splurges
Special days for encouraging shopping sprees and increased consumerism are many. There are days like Black Friday when you are bombarded by huge discounts and price offs. Of course people buy! Even those who are not in the habit of splurging find it hard to stop themselves.
At times like these, what you can do is arrange an automatic weekly transfer of a certain amount to your savings account from the beginning of September. Thus, when Black Friday does come, you’ll have enough funds to buy things.
Understand that the huge discounts only set you up for buying something big or expensive, which mitigates the discount cost for the sellers.
Use technologies to pay off debt faster
Why not let technology help you out? For instance there are tools which let you see when you shall be debt-free based on your current assets and liabilities. Using these can fine-tune your finances in ways would not have imagined possible!
How to Set Financial Goals - 6 Things To Do After You’ve Met All Your Savings Goals
You’ve done a lot this year. You have created a nice emergency fund enough to take you over three months of all expenses. That high interest debt you had? You paid it off too, and have started to siphon a nice percentage of your income towards your retirement.
All this is great work, but now what?
In case you are wondering how to save money beyond the basic steps, this article is what you should read.
- Check your budget: Maybe you needed to have a strict budget to pay off a toxic debt. But now, with that over with, you can switch over to a 50/30/20 budget. If you are already using this budget model, reevaluate that and see what are your wants and needs. Thus, you’ll see that more money is available.
- Take care of the low priority debt: You have paid back the high-interest debt first, and that’s a good thing. In fact, that’s how it should be done. But don’t stop now that it’s paid. Start paying off the low priorities debts.
- Use your savings: A lot of people keep a significant part of their money in a savings account in the same bank that has a checking account. Perhaps you are doing this too. Now, this earns you maybe .06% interest a year. But this can grow faster. Consider moving your emergency fund or your savings into a different type of account. Consider Certificates of Deposits. These can lock up your money for a certain time while it earns a high interest rate. If you have extra savings, CDs can be a great option. However, these are not so good for your emergency fund since you may need it at any time. For emergency funds, a high-yield savings account is a much better option since these have a higher minimum balance requirement and have high interest rates.
- Don’t forget to invest: This is a good time to rethink how much you need to save up for your retirement. Perhaps you may need to start saving more for that, or even set up a personal retirement account. If you want to start building up a portfolio, reach out to a broker.
- Insure yourself: Revisit the basics like homeowner’s insurance and car insurance. Think about in which stage of life you are in, and what things you are preparing how.
- Think bigger: Till now, you have covered the basics. Now you can finally pay attention to savings goals and projects which you may have put off till now. Whether it is to start a new business, a family vacation, or perusing a new hobby, now is the time to do them all. Just focus on saving cash.
Thursday, January 28, 2021
How to Decide on Your Financial Goals for 2021
No matter what your current financial situation is right now, it is everyone's goal to retire wealthy. For that you need a plan, but here’s the thing. In order to plan for the long term, you need to plan step by step as well. For instance, if you want to have saved Rs. 1 crore by the time of your retirement, you need a plan to save more per year. And to have a plan for each and every step, you do need financial goals. So for instance you want to save Rs. 100000 in 2021, you need a plan and goal.
In this article, we are going to give you 5 steps on how to do just that.
You know the importance of financial goals and how they ultimately add you in meeting all your financial needs at every stage of your life. But deciding on the goal, first of all, can be a hassle. It can be confusing and time-consuming. For instance, you may want to buy a house and a car. Or maybe you want to start a business. It can be anything. But until you have an action plan, all those dreams are only on paper. Here’s how to bring them into reality.
Do you need money to achieve it?
You may have more than one life goal, but you need to see if these goals are tied down to your money. For example, you may want to buy a house and a car down the line, but for that you need to save a lot of money. You may also want to save to start your own business before you turn 40, but for that you need not just working capital but also capital to bail you out in tough times.
How much money does your goal require?
So now that you know your goal requires money, the next step for planning is to know exactly or approximately how much money your goals require. For instance, it is not hard to know how much a car or home is for, but it can be hard to determine how much you’ll need to save for your business. Besides, to work out where and how to save up for these, you’ll have to factor in inflation, interest rates, lifestyle and also your returns on investments, in addition to your ability to save. For all this, it can be a good idea to take the help of a financial advisor.
When will you need the money?
When you do have the financial goals you want to go for, you need to know approximately when you’ll be needing the funds. If the sum is large, you’ll need to save up for that. For instance, you probably need to save a lot of buying a car, but not so much for home renovation. Determine how much time you need to get the amount you need.
Can you afford to save for it?
There are some life goals like retirement and child’s education which are non-negotiable for saving for. These are goals you can’t compromise on. But you can make choices. For instance, when it comes between saving for a car and saving for your child’s education, it’s a no-brainer. Surely, the latter is more important, right? In the end, make sure you have enough funds for these.
Create a budget and make investments
Finally, you need to make a budget which coincides with all your plans. Additionally, think about making investments to fuel your goals.
Remember, you may also need to monitor and revisit, and even change your plans from to time, even if minutely.
5 Key Aspects of Personal Finance
Do you know that is the main thing that makes people fail in their financial planning? The fact that they remain unaware of the problems and the things which need to be done to solve them. In our financial planning, we do plan a lot thinking that we are doing the right thing. However, that does not always prove to be sufficient. Thus, it is important to know what are the key components which you need to focus on when making a road map for your financial life.
In this blog, you shall learn about the various aspects of your personal finance. This shall give you a good idea of your complete financial picture.
Before we dive deeper, it is useful to know that the 5 levels of creating your financial plan are:
- Saving: The main thing on this level is to save enough to face a sudden financial need.
- Investing: Investing is more important that you give it credit for. This lets you aspire for your goals.
- Financial protection: These take the form of insurance plans and savings which protects you and your family, especially during tough times.
- Tax planning: When you have a proper tax planning process, you can bring down your expenses and save a lot more than what you are now.
- Retirement planning: This is a crucial part of your financial planning. You need to save up for your retirement, when you’ll have nothing to fall back on but your savings. Here is where you need to make sure that you have a big enough savings or bank account for your twilight years.
Saving
You never know when you may need a lot of money. It can be as commonplace as a car breakdown or as serious as unemployment for a few months. At times like these, you need as much savings as you can have. Experts say you should have savings enough to meet 6 months of all expenses. This is why you need to invest in debt instruments. These give you better returns than savings accounts, are highly liquid and have low interest and credit risk.
Investing
Investing is different from savings. When saving, you are putting money aside. When you are investing, you are making your money grow. For investing, mutual funds are an all-round investment option, but only if these are used right. You need to choose the right fund, according to your needs and risk horizon. Pick mutual funds based on your short term goals, mid-term goals and long-term goals.
Financial protection
Financial protection is what actually makes our dreams and visions come true. These give us and our loved ones a safety net, but if the protection plans are not chosen well, these can turn into a liability. Here, we are talking about insurance. There are 43 types of insurance of which you need to know and have. These are Term insurance, Health and Critical Insurance, Mortgage Protection Insurance and Personal Accidental Insurance.
Tax Saving
We can reduce how much we give in taxes, even though we need to adhere to tax slabs. There are as many as 70 tax exemptions and deduction options for you. With these, you can bring down your taxable income. The most important ones here are Section 80C and Section 80D.
Retirement planning
Retirement planning is essential. When you have retired, you’ll just have your savings to fall back on. To plan for your retirement, you need to build a retirement corpus and plan to generate an income on retirement.
Monday, January 18, 2021
Financial Goals - Missed Financial Goals
It is good to set and achieve a short-term financial goal. But, and it happens more often with many others than you think, what happens when you missed such a goal?
Do you get discouraged? Or do you look at the problem in the eye and try again?
Whether you planned to save money, take a vacation, or the goal to buy a car, don’t get discouraged if these plans did not work out. If these are still important to you, you can plan for them again, and even better than last time now that you have learnt your lesson. Life happens.
Here is now you can get back on track.
- Embrace your failure: We all have problems, but the very first trick for getting out of the mess is to focus on the bright side of things. And yes, all problems have a bright side, silver lining, and opportunities. All you want to do is to find and focus on these. Let’s say you did not manage to save as much money as you thought. Yes, you’re back when you started, with the same old bank account and basic amount. But now you know what did work and what did not. You can now get serious about saving. Setbacks are learning opportunities, all of them. If something did not work out your way, find out why that happened.
- When you do reach that goal you’ve set for yourself, or did not, it is essential to study your spending habits and compare it to your budget. This can work wonders.
- Make adjustments: So you have made a mistake, but did an audit of your personal finance as well right after the debacle. Did you cut your budget as far as possible? If so, it can be time to make more money. This can be till you reach your financial goal. For instance, if you want to go on a vacation, consider taking a weekend job, or things like babysitting or even a side hustle. These shall help you to make more money, which means more money saved. The other thing you can do is to make compromises. If the goal you set is too far-fetched, consider a cheaper option. Instead of a foreign trip, consider a local one, for instance. No matter which strategy you take, do avoid debts. Achieving life goals does not mean you should be drowning in debt after that.
- Cheer yourself: Monitor your progress during the journey to achieve your goals. Keep a tab on your finances, as often as it is comfortable for you. You need to analyze and adjust.
Monday, January 11, 2021
Financial Management for Women - Set your Financial Goals
Breaking the persistent shackles of patriarchy, the women of India have established their strong presence in almost all walks of life, thus emerging as an empowered lot. But how empowered are women in handling their money? Patriarchy is still extant when it comes to managing finances, and the average Indian woman has been somewhat diffident in taking independent financial decisions.
Financial management strategies must be customized to suit one’s requirements; there isn’t any handbook! Whether you are a young girl or an elderly lady, a risk-taker or risk-averse, single or married – all of these and several other factors will influence your style and technique of money management.
Let’s get you started on the basics of ‘intelligent financing.’
Set Your Financial Goals
You toil hard to earn money. You earn money to realize your dreams. But you can only realize those dreams when you appropriately channelize your earnings towards certain goals. Thus, the first step to dexterous money management is setting your short-term and some long-term financial goals. Analyze your current financial status, understand your financial obligations, parley with your spouse and figure out your priorities; then find a pragmatic way of venturing towards them.
Plan Your Budget
Once you have defined your financial goals, understood your financial standing and identified what you wish to accomplish, it’s time to set a budget plan that is in sync with your goals. Whether you customize a budget for yourself or adopt an existing budgeting model, school yourself to stick to it with the strongest determination.
Attend to the Emergencies
Crisis always lurks around the corner; you never know when you might meet one – an accident, an unplanned job switch, a medical emergency, and the list goes on. Protect yourself with an emergency fund. Save enough to be able to sustain for at least six months without a steady income. Get a health insurance; a life insurance policy as well, in case you have dependents. Make steady contributions to your retirement fund every month. Safeguard your future.
Be Financially Educated
Well, this is the pinnacle of all challenges. Financial education is the stepping stone to financial independence. Understand your salary structure, know all about income tax, acquaint yourself with the money market and learn about investment opportunities. You could talk to a professional advisor or a financially-knowledgeable acquaintance. Or you could just let Mr. Google enlighten you.
Park Your Money Safely
Learn the techniques of saving money. Stocks, bonds, shares, equities, mutual funds, term deposits, property, savings – myriad investment options are available. Understand their nuances and invest wisely. Spread your portfolio across multiple modes of investment.
Diving into the cryptic world of money management can be quite overwhelming. However, Indian women have proved their mettle – proficiently juggling their household and professional responsibilities. Money management will be a breeze once these ambidextrous ladies overcome their spurious apprehensions and assume an assertive role in their financial lives.
Sunday, January 10, 2021
The Most Powerful Money Habits You’ll Ever Learn
It is not easy to plan ahead when you are broke. However, your best option at a time like this would be to plan ahead. It’ll stop you from being broke, so that you can start rebuilding your strong financial future.
Those who have a good financial strategy save more money, are financially healthier, and live longer and happier lives. Those who don’t do this, face a ton of difficulties throughout their lives. For instance:
People who thought and planned for their retirement majorly, somewhat, or even just a little, when compared to non-planners, end up with twice the accumulated wealth. Using a retirement calculator is also shown to increase a person’s likelihood to save.
Those who plan for their children’s education save as much as 80% than those who don’t plan!
People who plan for irregular, large and unexpected financial expenses are 10 times more likely to have a healthy financial life in times of monetary problems.
Some studies have defined financial health to be retirement and emergency savings, along with a good credit score, sustainable debt loads, and property. It includes health and life insurance as well. Your financial health increases with age, income and education, and that increases the likelihood of planning your finances.
Those who do not plan do not focus on future expenses. What they are doing is planning for the short term only. And that is like expenses for the next week, or next year. The problem here is they will have great hardship to remain debt free in the future since they don’t have a long term plan.
Getting too worried to plan anything
This problem is more common than you think. If you are constantly worrying about your financial problem, it can be hard to plan ahead since you are concerned with your current issues. Unfortunately, our brains are wired in a way that it over-thinks problems. That’s an evolutionary defense mechanism to let us get rid of problems soon, but if the problem is a long-term one or if it is too pressing, it can easily make one worried and unfocussed. A scarcity mindset is not a good way to be. It affects not just your personal finance, but your personal relationships, and even your job.
When you have less mental energy due to constant worrying, you can’t focus on what needs to be done to solve the problem. By the way, being constantly preoccupied with problems drops your IQ by 13 points, as does staying up all night.
Learn to relax
Here is what helps. Cut yourself some slack, seriously. If you are strapped for time all day, give yourself 30 minutes to deal with all unexpected things happening. If your problem is financial, try to save a bit of money for a ‘rainy day fund.’ Even a few hundred bucks can do wonders, and can take a bit of load later on in times of hardships.
Next, you have to save a bit more for yourself. This means saving a part of your monthly salary before paying bills.
3 Ways To Sustain Your Family If Your Emergency Fund Runs Out
Yes, times are bad. The economy is not good. Jobs are drying up, as are people’s savings. There is news of job loss and salary cuts everywhere. Yes, times are bad.
Now, you may have an emergency fund, but what will you do or can do when this fund dries up as well? Be prepared for anything, or at least think these things through. Then financial shocks won’t be much of a problem. Let’s face it, people are getting desperate right now with their savings drying up, which is why loans are a big deal right now.
But if you plan ahead for such financial setbacks, you’ll be a lot better off than most. Here is what you can do if you see your emergency fund drying off.
Find out what resources you have
If you have a home, you can get a home equity credit line, which is one of the cheapest credit lines you can get right now. You can use your home to get a credit if the situation comes to the worst. However, use this option only when there is no other avenue left. Use it if there’s no food on the table and there’s no other way out. In that case, mortgage your home and do your best to find a good job in the meantime to start paying it back, or saving up for repayment.
Think about using your credit cards as well in such dire situations, before mortgage the home. Yes, interest rates for credit card loans are higher, but in tough situations, anything helps. Payday loans are not recommended as their interest rates are too high, often in 3-digits!
Cut down on bills
Before you even tap into your emergency funds, why not cut down on things you don’t need right now? Can you do it with just one mobile phone? Sell the spare. Don’t need some old clothes? How about a garage sale! Can you do without a cable TV connection? Great, do so. Anything you save right now is going to help you out. Use these first, for a bare-bones lifestyle before even getting to the emergency fund.
Your priority is keeping your home and basic utilities like power and water. If you rent a property, paying that rent is your priority because landlords can, in some areas, legally toss you out for even one month’s non-payment of rent.
If you have loans, try to negotiate the lower payments. If that’s not possible, bear with your creditors and don’t miss payments. That can harm your credit score, and spoil your future chances of getting loans.
Keep retirement funds as your last resort
This is another one of your last line of defenses. This can save you for the time being, but in time it can create a problem during tax time as you’ll have to pay income tax and a hefty penalty. Additionally, if you take money from this fund, you lose all the compound interest till now. If you do have a job, withdraw half of your retirement savings or Provident Fund.
Friday, January 8, 2021
Goals Of Financial Management - 4 Personal Financial Goals
Remember those financial goals you make back at the beginning of this year? With the year drawing to an end, and with Fall just ahead, it is a good time to revisit your financial goals. It is also a good time to check if any of those goals have gone awry. Here are some financial must-do things or this Fall.
Create an emergency fund
This September has 5 Fridays, which means an extra week’s worth of paycheck! If you are getting this huge benefit, consider to use this bonus to start building your emergency fund. Even small amounts of emergency fund can help you during times of car repairs, medical expenses, unexpected emergencies, and more. A good place to start doing this from is your high-yield online savings account.
Already have a good enough emergency fund nest? Then use that bonus towards paying your mortgage debt or credit card debt, or even planning to use it next year.
Oh and by the way, this December has 5 Fridays as well!
Increase your retirement savings
Are you maximizing your PF or Provident Fund? If so, this is a good time to consider making an increase to this contribution.
The minimum goal for provident fund should be to contribute enough to get any employer in the future to match your current company’s offer. If it is possible, boost your contribution by 10% or even by 15% by the end of this year.
You can contribute up to a certain amount per year, and this amount is tax-deductible. If you are older than 50, you can add another certain amount to build up your retirement egg nest.
Save something for those shopping splurges
Special days for encouraging shopping sprees and increased consumerism are many. There are days like Black Friday when you are bombarded by huge discounts and price offs. Of course people buy! Even those who are not in the habit of splurging find it hard to stop themselves.
At times like these, what you can do is arrange an automatic weekly transfer of a certain amount to your savings account from the beginning of September. Thus, when Black Friday does come, you’ll have enough funds to buy things.
Understand that the huge discounts only set you up for buying something big or expensive, which mitigates the discount cost for the sellers.
Use technologies to pay off debt faster
Why not let technology help you out? For instance there are tools which let you see when you shall be debt-free based on your current assets and liabilities. Using these can fine-tune your finances in ways would not have imagined possible!
Thursday, January 7, 2021
How to Set Financial Goals for Yourself - Set Financial Goals
When you are just starting out on setting and subsequently balancing your financial goals, it is easy and natural to feel overwhelmed and lost. In situations like these, start by asking yourself this question: What does success mean to you?
For some people, success is but a luxurious lifestyle which brings high-end cars, big houses and tons of cash to spend on. For others, it means owning a business, getting financial freedom, gaining financial security, and not having to worry about money any more. What you need to do right now is close your eyes. Yes, close your eyes and visualize your future, or rather how you want your future to be like. In such visualizations, you can set aspirations and align values. As you are making a plan, make sure to leave room enough for your immediate goals.
Find what inspires you: In this phase, think on not just those things which you do or have to do, but why you want to do these things. When you have a reason for your goals, you get a whole new level of perspective and get a ton of motivation. For instance, you know you have to build up an emergency fund or you won’t be able to pay rent. Or you need to get rid of your debit card debt fast so that you can start building up a fund for your own wedding. Both of these are motivating factors, right?
When you set goals, you make doubly sure that you’ll be successful.
Know more about your situation: You have given your situation some thought, and you have discovered that you have more than one goal. This leads to a bit of analysis paralysis, and you are confused about the next step. On the other hand, it may also happen that you do not have any specific goals. That is fine, don’t worry about it. Here’s what you should do.
a) Start with assessing your net worth, income tax situation and income: When you have a good understanding of these things, you will find that it is easier to determine goals and to prioritize for them as well.
b) Check up your financial health: This is an important point. The more your score is, the more flexible you can be when achieving your goals. If you have a low score, it means that there are some goals that require your attention.
To tackle problem areas, here’s what you can do:
a) Make a budget
b) Start creating your emergency fund
c) Start saving for retirement
d) Pay off your debt
Create SMART goals: SMART goals stand for Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic and time-bound. You want all of your goals to have each of these elements. So how does it work in real life? Let’s say that you are planning to go on a vacation.
First, lay out all the details. This means picking a destination, deciding when to go and estimating the cost. You then determine if the trip is worth taking given your savings, income and expenses.
If the goal is too high, make adjustments or even scrap it. So maybe you have not saved enough to go on a 6-month vacation in Europe. So what? Postpone the trip for a year or two, save up for the time being, automate your savings, and open new savings accounts that give higher interest along with sign-up bonus.
Write down your goals: By now, you know what your goals are. It is time now to write them down. When you do this, your goals become tangible, clear and organized. Put all this in a document that you can easily keep track of. Completed one goal? Move on to the next.
Treat yourself
The past few steps were not easy, were they? Setting and achieving goals is not easy. This is why you need to reward yourself for every step of progress you make. For instance, if you have built your emergency fund, reward yourself by starting a business or by buying a new car.
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
Goals Of Financial Management - 4 Personal Financial Goals
Remember those financial goals you make back at the beginning of this year? With the year drawing to an end, and with Fall just ahead, it is a good time to revisit your financial goals. It is also a good time to check if any of those goals have gone awry. Here are some financial must-do things or this Fall.
Create an emergency fund
This September has 5 Fridays, which means an extra week’s worth of paycheck! If you are getting this huge benefit, consider to use this bonus to start building your emergency fund. Even small amounts of emergency fund can help you during times of car repairs, medical expenses, unexpected emergencies, and more. A good place to start doing this from is your high-yield online savings account.
Already have a good enough emergency fund nest? Then use that bonus towards paying your mortgage debt or credit card debt, or even planning to use it next year.
Oh and by the way, this December has 5 Fridays as well!
Increase your retirement savings
Are you maximizing your PF or Provident Fund? If so, this is a good time to consider making an increase to this contribution.
The minimum goal for provident fund should be to contribute enough to get any employer in the future to match your current company’s offer. If it is possible, boost your contribution by 10% or even by 15% by the end of this year.
You can contribute up to a certain amount per year, and this amount is tax-deductible. If you are older than 50, you can add another certain amount to build up your retirement egg nest.
Save something for those shopping splurges
Special days for encouraging shopping sprees and increased consumerism are many. There are days like Black Friday when you are bombarded by huge discounts and price offs. Of course people buy! Even those who are not in the habit of splurging find it hard to stop themselves.
At times like these, what you can do is arrange an automatic weekly transfer of a certain amount to your savings account from the beginning of September. Thus, when Black Friday does come, you’ll have enough funds to buy things.
Understand that the huge discounts only set you up for buying something big or expensive, which mitigates the discount cost for the sellers.
Use technologies to pay off debt faster
Why not let technology help you out? For instance there are tools which let you see when you shall be debt-free based on your current assets and liabilities. Using these can fine-tune your finances in ways would not have imagined possible!
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
What are the bad financial habits you need to break ? - 7 Bad Financial Habits that may Bankrupt You
Here are the 7 bad habits you need to break, or you just might go broke.
Stop spending more than your income: This alone will bring you closure to debt and possibly bankruptcy, unless you are careful. Your income is limited, let’s face it. Let’s not spend more than you earn.
Don’t ignore your bills: You’ll be surprised to know how many people do this, and thus continue to fall in debt. People take loans, and then when the time comes to pay EMIs, they procrastinate. People also tend to give themselves excuses to justify their actions. Thus, their interest rate for such loans continues to rise. This is the way many people fall into a debt cycle, and ultimately become bankrupt.
Don’t use your credit card like it’s free money: Banks and other lenders want you to think that credit card is free money, and it can be if you use it correctly, but it can also bring you a world of trouble. Credit card EMIs are high. If you use your credit card like an ATM, by the way, the interest rate is much higher.
If you use credit cards in the right way though, your loans can become interest-free. To do that, you need to pay back the loan before the due date, after which the lender charges interest.
Don’t think that you are not smart enough: In today’s time, you need to take control of your own finances. You need to plan for your own retirement, save for an emergency fund, have various insurances, and more. It is all up to you. The excuse that all this is too complicated and difficult doesn’t cut it anymore. You can research on and learn about almost anything online. Besides, you can always hire a professional finance planner to help you out.
Don’t make saving hard: You may have habits, such as too-frugal spending, which is saving impossible. If you spend on things on the drop of a hat, it is high time you smell the coffee of reality.
Don’t complain about your paychecks: Complaining about your salary will not do any good for you. On the contrary, it will only ensure that you remain in the same situation. Instead, take up side gigs, try freelancing, start a small business, to make more money.
Don’t think that money brings happiness: While it is true that money brings happiness, it does so up to a point. There are other things which bring you happiness, including giving money to charity.
Monday, November 9, 2020
Financial Goals - Missed Financial Goals
Here is now you can get back on track.
Embrace your failure: We all have problems, but the very first trick for getting out of the mess is to focus on the bright side of things. And yes, all problems have a bright side, silver lining, and opportunities. All you want to do is to find and focus on these. Let’s say you did not manage to save as much money as you thought. Yes, you’re back when you started, with the same old bank account and basic amount. But now you know what did work and what did not. You can now get serious about saving. Setbacks are learning opportunities, all of them. If something did not work out your way, find out why that happened.
When you do reach that goal you’ve set for yourself, or did not, it is essential to study your spending habits and compare it to your budget. This can work wonders.
Make adjustments: So you have made a mistake, but did an audit of your personal finance as well right after the debacle. Did you cut your budget as far as possible? If so, it can be time to make more money. This can be till you reach your financial goal. For instance, if you want to go on a vacation, consider taking a weekend job, or things like babysitting or even a side hustle. These shall help you to make more money, which means more money saved. The other thing you can do is to make compromises. If the goal you set is too far-fetched, consider a cheaper option. Instead of a foreign trip, consider a local one, for instance. No matter which strategy you take, do avoid debts. Achieving life goals does not mean you should be drowning in debt after that.
Cheer yourself: Monitor your progress during the journey to achieve your goals. Keep a tab on your finances, as often as it is comfortable for you. You need to analyze and adjust.