Rather than rant and rave about the effects, I thought I’d take a look at the causes and by doing this hopefully deter some from making irresponsible financial choices or lackadaisical attempts to learn about their finances. What we don’t realize is what we pay the least attention to is what has a large impact on our lives.
Take for instance myself. During my earlier years in college, I took advantage of all of the offers of credit I was given only to later find myself unable to pay back my debts, which in turn was reflected on my credit report. The negative reports on my credit would later come back to haunt me when I was trying to purchase my first car. However, I didn’t think of that while I was carelessly spending money I didn’t really have. I just think that personal finance should definitely be talked about more in high school and college if not in depth at least to the point where it would peak the interest of students to go out and learn more about it on their own.
I know I’ve talked about this in my other blogs, but making smart decisions is a benefit in all aspects of your life-especially concerning your finances. So I thought I’d offer some areas where you could start making better decisions.
Plan What You Spend - being conscious of the amount of money you make in relation to your overhead will keep you aware of what you can and can not spend and also help you to focus on areas where you can lower expenses and create more spending money.
Use Your Credit Wisely - this means knowing the advantages and disadvantages of credit cards, their rates and their purpose. This also gets into Good Debt vs. Bad debt. I wrote about this in an earlier blog.
Stay Within Your Means - when you do this you make room to increase your means so that you are able to comfortably afford even more luxuries without overextending your finances.
Build An Emergency Fund - when you have an amount of money put aside you don’t have to worry about car trouble or a pricey repair putting you behind on your monthly expenses.
IRA or 401(k) - contributing to one of these accounts prepares you for a comfortable retirement.
Learn More About Investing - gaining more knowledge on investing will help you to increase your finances by having the ability to choose the investments that are right for you. A lot of people shy away from investing thinking they can’t do it however if you learn about it you will find that anyone can use investing to their advantage.
All of these topics, if they haven’t already been discussed, will be discussed in depth throughout this blog so that you can gain full control of your financial future. It all starts with a base. Having a firm knowledge of how personal finances work and what areas to strengthen before you move on to the next is the best way to go. That’s why in this blog I started with the base, the ground floor, of your financial fortress so that you can learn about how everything works together for your benefit. Once you understand how everything works, why you should do certain things in a certain order and how to make the right financial choices that will lead you to the achievement of your financial goals, it makes it that much easier to move along the right path to financial success. Here’s to the desire to learn more about personal finance and the want to make the right financial choices towards financial abundance!
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May 11th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
I like that you mentioned “Plan What You Spend” first. Budgeting your money is first and foremost! Smart decisions start there!