The Basics of Financial Management

So I know that I’ve been gone for a while. I took some time off to take care of things. But now we go back to the all important thing of remembering to stick to the basics.

So what are the basics of financial management? How do you adapt and change the basic fundamentals to work best for you?

The absolute basic rule that you need to know about money is that you need to make more money than you spend. This is the basic rule that needs to be followed before anything else. So before you go any further, make sure that you are following rule number one. If you are on a downward spiral into debt, the first thing you have to do is stop moving backwards. Once you firmly decide and act against spending more than you make, you will start to see process. It might take a little while for you first success, but after the first one, you will see how much better things become.

The second rule of financial management is that you need to save money for your future use. This is a category with plenty of elements in it. If you are just starting on your way to good financial management, make sure that you only do one or two things in this category. I put this as the second rule because at the beginning you will be focused on getting out of debt, but the accumulation of wealth is a long and slow process and should be started as soon as possible to allow for the maximum return possible. At first you should just start some basic savings and then you can diversify and work on retirement, emergency funds, and extra savings for other expenses.

The third rule that you want to follow is to pay off your debt. When you have debt, you are paying your money and interest to someone instead of being able to use that money for yourself. There are a couple of exceptions such as buying a house, but you still want to pay that off as fast as possible. I can tell you from personal experience that when you no longer have to pay $500 dollars a month to debt, your life is tons better. This is while I wasn’t making very much and that was way more than I thought I could afford or deal with. With lots of work and effort, I was able to get out of that debt and the increase in cash that I could use for me was a gift from God.

The fourth rule is that you have to stay out of debt. This sounds like it makes sense, but a lot of people think that it won’t happen to them, but there are people who get out of debt and then get back into it. I have done this and it was because I stopped paying attention and got sloppy. So after you have gotten the basics of these four rules going, you can spend some time customizing a financial plan to yourself.