Platform for financial success (Day to Day Finances).

In follow-up to what I promised in the previous article, “Take ownership of your personal finances”, I would like to start off by giving opinion on how to run and manage one’s finances from a day to day perspective. In life’s journey, we pass through various stages, which are all impacted by how we plan ourselves on a day to day basis. Each day, we incur various challenges and also opportunities to be the masters of our own destiny. Once we learn how to manage our finances daily, that knowledge twill set us up to live comfortable standards and take advantage of other opportunities to save and invest, creating financial security and also accumulating and protecting wealth in the long run. There is no magic to being successful financially, it all involves careful and diligent planning as I will illustrate below. Firstly, we should all take time to review our goals in life now and the future. Create a plan on how you intend to get there. This will be the platform for you to manage your cash flow now, tomorrow and into the future. It will allow you to manage your income and how you spend it. Most of us have bank accounts, I would advice that we review the type of accounts we have and make sure we have accounts that suit our banking needs. Select a chequing or saving account by assessing your usage and needs. A lot of people have the wrong bank accounts, and thus are paying a huge amount of fees to banks, which is obviously helping pay people like me (bank employees) and also shareholders. Nothing wrong with that, but as I said earlier, my purpose of the blog is to educate my friends and colleagues and ensure they get ahead financially. Secondly and more importantly, ensure you have a budget of your expenditure. Plan your future use of any income and ensure that as suggested in my earlier article, spend less than you make. If you are those that are already spending more than you earn, then reduce your spending. Without these, you are headed for a financial meltdown should any unexpected events come up. In addition to that, if you have any debt from previous spending habits, pay the debt down because as you by now may know, the interest rates are ridiculously high. And more importantly, avoid consumer debt (buying stuff that will not bring any value/appreciate in value over the long term),-more on of these on another day. Remember we have got to start somewhere in life, and I believe that the first step is always the most difficult step, but once we get ourselves going then anything is achievable. It doesn’t matter what situation you find yourself in, if you can take into account the above mentioned strategies in managing your day to day running of finances, then I believe you will build a solid foundation that will allow you to successfully navigate the various stages of life’s journey all the way to a happy retirement. Invest in educating yourself financially, and trust me the time and cost will pay off in the long run