Financial worry is one of the biggest causes of stress in our lives, but it doesn’t have to be.
We can make a conscious decision to maintain control and order over our money, or we can feel like our Money Management is in a perpetual state of chaos.
The enlightened realise this is a choice that must be backed up by sustained effort until habits are built. We don’t need to live in chaos. The many moving pieces of our financial world can be tamed and orderly. We can manage our money like a farmer skillfully herds sheep into a pen rather than having to deal with a bunch of stray cats that are always slipping away from us!
Setting up an effective Money Management system will enable you to take control of your finances and give you peace of mind.
To gain clarity around your spending, you must first categorise your separate your expenses and allocate them into different ‘buckets’. The categories and the buckets are completely personal, but we can teach you a system and support you as part of our Strategic Mortgage Broking or Property Planning service to implement including providing you with our Money Management Principles education Handbook.
Our preferred buckets include –
- Grow (salary credits and necessities expenses such as utilities, loan repayments and non-negotiable necessity repayments),
- Life (variable necessities such as groceries and transport),
- Fun (all the fun things in life, like entertainment)
- Investment (income, interest and expenses for your investments in one place to ensure they are separate from your personal expenditure).
You may also like to set up a goal bucket because if you get your spending under control, you can then actually set goals for an area that you would like to spend more on, if only you had more money! As long as you do not spend more than you have saved of course
Your spending more goals might increase when focus to save up for holidays! (airplane + palm tree emoji). Or budget for furniture or eating out or simply more investing! The wonderful by product of managing your money better is being able invest in more of what you enjoy doing!!
So, decide on your buckets and the purpose for each, and this will enable you to track how much you spend throughout the month and see where you can trim the fat!
Contact us for a free meeting with a Strategic Mortgage Broker or Property Planner on how you can set up an effective money management system that interacts seamlessly with your mortgage strategy.
