Meeting the demands of your life can be difficult at best sometimes. However, when you include your personal finances, the obstacles can increase. There are great ways to make smarter spending and saving choices, if you have the right mind set and willpower. Make a good start by reading on, and find some great advice for putting you on the right financial path.
In order to keep track of your personal finances, use a smart phone based app or a calendar warning, on your computer or phone, to tell you when bills are due. You should set goals for how much you want to have spent by a particular date in the month. This works because it’s an easy reminder and you don’t even need to think about it, once you’ve set it up.
Small daily savings will quickly add up. Forgo store brands for generic brands, and check out which food items are on sale. Be willing to switch to food that is currently on sale.
It is imperative that one is able to draw from an emergency fund when emergencies arise. The first baby step is to save up 500 dollars of an emergency fund, and then as you can, increase it to 1000 dollars. After you are used to not touching your emergency fund and you start building, you should end up with three to six months worth of living expenses as your emergency fund.
Day trading is for certain people, and its always great to take profits off of the table and buy into other stocks. However, the best strategy when it comes to investing is buy and hold. This strategy has been tested over and over again, and it is a solid foundation on building wealth through investing.
When you invest, do not put all of your eggs in one basket. Even if you think that the stock is hot at the moment, if the tides change suddenly, you can lose all of your money quickly. A smarter way to invest is by diversifying. A diversified portfolio, can help whether financial storms much better.
This is, perhaps, the simplest personal finance tip of all, but it so often gets overlooked. If you want to take charge of your finances and your bank account, you must spend less than you earn. Spending more than you bring in is a recipe for financial disaster.
Have your bank account set up so that a portion of your income is automatically transferred to your savings account on a regular basis. This will put the money out of reach and out of your mind so that you won’t be tempted to spend it. You can decide how much you can afford, but make sure that the money is taken on the same day each month or each week.
If you plan on sending your children to college, start putting money away from the day they are born. Don’t wait until the kids are almost college age to start thinking about saving; you won’t have nearly enough money to pay for their education if you do. Since college is so expensive, you need to start saving as soon as you can.
Make sure that you’re never purchasing an item you cannot afford, even if you do have a high credit limit. There is no reason that you cannot make do with a 32-inch TV instead of that 60-inch mega-screen. Why spend the extra $1,000 on luxury when you know you’ll have to pay back $2,000-plus with interest?
Don’t automatically buy the biggest containers of a product thinking you will be saving money. While that is most often the rule many times a comparison of the per unit price of a product will show that it is actually the same between bigger and smaller containers, or even that you would actually save by buying the smaller quantity!
If your employer matches your 401k contributions, maximize your contributions to take advantage of this “free” retirement money. You do not pay taxes on the money you contribute until after you start drawing it as income, so you are actually reducing your tax load in the short term by investing more for the long term.
Save your pennies–literally. Choose a container, such as a large jar and make it difficult to get into, so you don’t rob yourself. Drop all of your pocket change into the container, and when it’s full, treat yourself or your family to something fun. Depending on the size of your container, it could be a special day out–or an entire vacation!
It is easy to see that with some minor changes, combined with the right attitude, you can make a big change in your financial outlook. Getting the most out of the money that you bring in, is just as important as what you get from the money you spend. Use what you have learned here to get control of your finances, and stop letting them control you.
