Saturday, February 27, 2010

Secrets to Sound Financial Health

I love managing money. I love tracking expenses. Almost daily I track my expenses in excel sheet. Every time I get paid, I setup necessary transfers to various savings accounts for different savings goal. I spend time to make sure that there are sufficient funds in respective bank accounts so that none of the ECS or cheques gets bounce.

So, I am always in control of my money. My daily tracking makes sure that I am never spending more then what I am earning, I am not paying any unnecessary late fees on bills or any bank charges because of bounced cheque or ECS. But only this is not sufficient for my financial health.

A key aspect in Sound Financial Health is that one should know where one wants to be in next 10-15 years. One should know that what are his financial goals that he wants to achieve in next 10-15 years. The compiled list of long and mid term goals is the first step that is required before they can be achieved.

Once these are set, it's important that other then tracking expenses and setting up transfers, one spends some time understanding various tools how these goals can be achieved. If you don't know anything about real-estate market and one of your goals is to buy a house in next 5 years, then please make yourself aware with know-how of dealing in real estate. Same goes with Stock Markets, take out some time and read from Internet or so many good books on investing.

And as the last thing, do review your progress on the goals on fixed intervals, say every 6 months.

This along with managing expenses on daily bases will give you good and sound financial health.

2 comments:

  1. I am not good at tracking expenses at the minute level that you do, but I do keep a track on the big ticket items. I also have a monthly saving target and I try to meet that too. But to keep track of each and every item is just too cumbersome and impractical for me.

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