Well, the birthday celebration is over. It is time to get focused on this brand-new year. As taboo as it is I am here to talk about money. What inspired me to start this blog is that fact everyone comments on my financial habits. The passive aggressive comments really make my skin crawl – just because I work incredibly hard to be where I am financially. I wasn’t born into some wealthy family. My parents barely had two pennies to rub together when I was younger. I am grateful for everything they did for us. We never went without but we weren’t ahead. I watched the struggle and listened to any advice anyone would give me. The one thing I have learned is that no one actually teaches you the basics of finance. They think they do but they really don’t. It was more important to learn about the Pythagorean theorem then understanding how a loan works. I am hoping to pass along all the knowledge I have learned from trial and error. In hopes that someone else will have success as well. I want to be clear I am not a millionaire. I have enough to not live paycheck to paycheck. Having a peace of mind financially is priceless in my opinion. I will start with the basics. Then I will give some ‘side hustles’ a trial to see what we can do it help improve our financial stability. No matter how old you are we have to start from the basics.
Where is our money coming and going? I like to think of them as little players. We have to know who is on our roster. The first thing you need to do is create the roster. I want you to sit down and create a list of every account that is associated with money. That can be savings account, checking account, loans, utilities, Netflix, ect. If the account involves money write it down. We are going to organize them into two groups next. Fancy accounting people call them accounts receivable vs accounts payable. I am no fancy accounting person. I want to compare them to team. You have defense (accounts payable) and offense (account receivable).
Let’s start with the defensive players. Defensive players are all the money we pay towards things. That can be mortgage/rent, utilities, internet, cell phone, groceries, ect. We wouldn’t want the other team (Netflix, Mortgage, Utilities) to score more (amount of bills) than what we score (money we make). Once you list all your accounts, we should look at the defensive players which is the amount of money we pay monthly. Our goal is to keep the minimum amount of money going to others then what we are keeping for ourselves. Once you have made that list the next step is offensive player. Most individuals only have one offensive player. It is possible to have more than one income. It is a lot to process our team. Sometimes it is quite shocking to see everything that is involved with our money. It can be very overwhelming to start. Once you know our key players, we will know how to use them to our advantage. That is called budgeting. We will touch on that next time. Homework: write out all of your players on your team. To help set that up here a free template of my list of accounts.
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