All in Budgeting
Personal finance is deeply personal, and everyone goes about it slightly differently but the key to those who succeed and get ahead is working out exactly where their money is. One of the first tips I offer people who email me is to track their financial activity. Only when you do this in some form or other can you make the right changes and start to understand where all of your money is going.
At age 44 it feels like a bit of a milestone, to finally turn my back on ANY access to credit and lending of any kind. I seriously feel a bit like a grown up now and I’m kicking another Australian owned bank to the curb and chopping up my credit card.
Tracking every cent makes me calculate each and every time whether we made a good decision with our money. Money is hard to earn and easy to spend so I want to know that I use it as wisely as possible and not look at my bank account and wonder where the hell it all went.
Because I threw off the shackles of debt some time ago I have become a little out of touch with mortgages. I’ve had enough emails about “Offset Mortgages” to make me think that this is something I need to look into because there are obviously a few of you out there who either use this system of banking or want to know what it is all about. This blog post may ruffle a few feathers...
Two weeks ago I was giving away a book The Simple Path To Wealth by JL Collins and in order to win it I asked you to send me an email telling me the most simple strategy you have devised so far to get yourself ahead financially. I was flooded with suggestions and I thought that they were just too good not to share.
For me an emergency fund is a lump of cash that sits in my bank account at the ready, poised for action, poised to save my butt from impending failure and doom, that can be readily accessed at a moments notice.
Olivia spent the school holidays working hard and she has found herself with that wonderful problem, too much cash sitting in the bank. In this blog post, I detail a strategy to show her how to make her hard earned money work for her and create a strong financial future for herself.
I met Ronnie when she reached out to me via email and we struck up a conversation. In this guest blog post, she shares how having a budget has helped to get her finances under control.
Having a common goal helps. We equally don’t want to be broke now or broke in retirement. We want to work less now, enjoy family life now, be prepared when things go wrong and not be so reliant on other people to create an income. These goals keep us on the straight and narrow and they are something that we openly discuss.
