Use This Advice To Meet Your Financial Goals

In these uncertain times, keeping a close and careful eye on your personal finances is more important than ever. To make sure you’re making the most of your money, here are some tips and ideas that are easy to implement, covering just about every aspect of saving, spending, earning, and investing.

Spending less than you earn is the number one way to financial freedom. This ensures that you have money to save and you do not acquire debt that will keep you in the hole! It is always good not to have debt hanging over your head causing stress in your life.

If you’re still in school and have a job, refrain from purchasing a car. This is especially true if you want to keep your finances looking clear and colorful going forward. Getting into a bad auto deal now will just leave things looking bleak. Hopefully you can get a car for a graduation gift, or at the very least borrow your parents’ car until you can outright afford one.

Try to pay more than the minimum payments on your credit cards. When you only pay the minimum amount off your credit card each month it can end up taking years or even decades to clear the balance. Items that you bought using the credit card can also end up costing you over twice the purchase price.

If you want to keep your credit score as high as possible, you should have between two and four credit cards in active use. Having at least two cards helps you establish a clear payment history, and if you’ve been paying them off it raises your score. Holding more than four cards at a time, however, makes it look like you’re trying to carry too much debt, and hurts your score.

It is imperative that one is able to draw from an emergency fund when emergencies arise. The first baby step is to save up 500 dollars of an emergency fund, and then as you can, increase it to 1000 dollars. After you are used to not touching your emergency fund and you start building, you should end up with three to six months worth of living expenses as your emergency fund.

Feel free to take advantage of paperless billing and paperless bank statements, but be careful not to become senseless on personal finance matters. The pitfall lurking in paperless finance lies in how easy it becomes to ignore your month-to-month finances. Banks, billers, or even thieves, can take advantage of this willful ignorance, so force yourself to review your online finances regularly.

Start building up an emergency fund today. In an ideal world you should have at least three months, preferable six months, living expenses stored away. Put it in an easy access, high interest savings account. If you don’t have any money saved, remember that it is never too late to start saving.

These tips will help you save more, spend wisely, and have enough left over to make smart investments. Now that you know the best rules of the financial road, start thinking about what to do with all that extra cash. Don’t forget to save, but if you’ve been especially good, a small personal reward could be nice too!