Managing your money turns out to be a much harder task than you might think! It takes a bit of knowledge, being organized, and discipline to stay on top of your money. It’s important to learn to do so, because if you don’t stay on top of your money, it’ll stay on top of you! (Cardinal Rule #2 – Be the Master of your Money, not vice-versa) If you’re not on top of your finances, you might worry that it’s laziness, but sometimes people just aren’t good with money, so they either get professional help in the form of a money manager or more likely, just continue to keep the status quo of hoping for there’s enough money in the account to pay the bills at the end of the month. Managing your money isn’t actually that hard, and I’d love to give you a few practical tips to help you feel more empowered!

Learn To Budget Well

The first thing that you should do is learn to budget well. I would argue that if you only took one piece of advice on managing your money better it’d be to budget. It’s not a difficult thing to do once you know what you’re doing, so just take it in baby steps. Write down the total amount that comes into the household each month. Then, write a list of everything that goes out, with what it is written next to it, so you don’t get confused. Add up the total outgoing cost and take it away from the incoming cost. This is what you’ve got left for the month because the rest has got to go on bills!

It’s not as easy to stick to as that, but we’re sure you can do it if you put your mind to it. The easiest way to do this is to simply pretend that the money you have to pay out doesn’t exist. You don’t see it, you don’t know about it, all you’ve got is what you budgeted for. This is for any luxuries, savings, or additional expenses you might have.

There are plenty of good tools out there (just google budgeting software), or I personally just use a spreadsheet (#oldfashioned) and it works for me!

Educate yourself

I fully realize that not everyone is as interested or gets as excited about personal finance as I do. However, there are lots of general topics that you should be aware of how they work. For example, you should broadly understand how taxes work (and how you can minimize them), how the stock market works, how interest rates work, and of course how a budget works. You could take it a step further and actually take some courses on this especially if you’re interested in a career change. I’m sure that once you’re trained a little more, you could find some finance work somewhere.

Whether it’s a full blown course study or just spending time on the basics, it is wise to educate yourself in something that profoundly affects your life and you future!

Money Can’t Buy Everything

Finally, you need to understand that money can’t buy everything. A lot of the time, when people aren’t good at managing their finances, it’s because they like to live beyond their means. Even though this is the case, you’ve got to realize that money isn’t everything. You don’t have to spend money to be on top in life; you don’t have to have what everyone else has to fit in. Saving your money for when you need it is a far better idea than just splashing it on random things that you felt like having at the time. It’s not going to make you feel better, and you could end up putting yourself in a bad position when you really need the money.

Money is neither good nor bad, it’s simply a tool. This tool won’t bring you happiness or joy and won’t solve all your problems. Once you internalize that and treat money as it should be treated (as a tool), your reality will start to shift and hopefully be more fulfilling!

We hope that you have found this article helpful and now know some of the things that you can do to become better at managing your finances. Good luck!

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