5 Tips for Great Financial Planning

The modern economy makes financial planning more important than ever. Having a financial plan is crucial to get anywhere with your money, but you need to make sure that it’s a great financial plan. Achieving tremendous wealth is rarely easy, but enjoying sound financial health is certainly attainable if you have the right tips. Start with the handful you’re about to read.

5 Planning Tips You Can Start With

It’s easy to find effective financial planning tips, but the best ones are the great ones you can start with where you’re at right now in life:

Create an Emergency Fund: Try to keep around 5% of your post-tax income for unexpected situations that are going to pop up from time to time.
Automate Your Savings: There’s no willpower or discipline involved or necessary when you set up regular installments to be saved from your paychecks into savings and investment accounts every time you get paid.
Take Advantage of Workplace Retirement Plans: If you have access to an employer-sponsored retirement investment plan, such as 401(k), then take advantage of it for tax benefits. Never leave matching contributions on the table, either.
Stick With Your Budget: You need to make one first, and that’s the easy part. Sticking with it isn’t as easy, but it can be if you review it for just a few minutes early each day and remember why you’re doing it.
Pay Your Credit Cards Off: Paying just the minimum payments every month means you could be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year in various interest charges.

Get Help With This

If you’re like most working adults, you spend quite a few hours every week making money. How much effort do you put into making all that money actually do some work for you? Hiring a financial advisor Scottsdale professional means you can have someone do that for you.

If you want to be good with money and financial planning but aren’t naturally great at it, then consider hiring a financial advisor in Scottsdale or your area. You can have a partner that helps you with planning your retirement, making decisions that create a net worth big enough to accomplish your financial goals, and creating specific plans for each objective you’d like to achieve in life.

One area the right financial planner might be able to help you with immediately is saving money on taxes. Paying taxes might not be entirely unavoidable, but you can take steps that help you minimize your tax burden and keep more of your money in your own pocket. That leaves more for saving, spending, or investing.

Keys You Should Remember

To start with, always keep the end goal in mind. Have some kind of vision about what you would like in life.

Second, track your money. Figure out what your net income is, but also track where your money goes. That means monitoring expenses at a daily, weekly, and monthly level.

Keep in touch with your credit score. If it’s under 650, then you should take steps to get it up. Once you are at that level, you’ll enjoy better interest rates and premiums on things ranging from credit cards to insurance plans. You might even be able to start consolidating debts to lower-interest accounts.

Consider multiple income streams. Even if you have a full-time job or primary source of income, one or two side hustles can really smooth out your cash flow. In time, they might even turn into lucrative opportunities that you can really bank on.

One thing to consider is that after you do all this, you need to keep paying your bills on time. Many people wind up trying financial planning to get out of situations they were once in, only to get overconfident and wind up back in those circumstances once more. The more often you pay on time, the more you’ll avoid late fees and help improve your credit score. Payment reminders and automatic bill pay options help out a lot.

Conclusion

No matter what you do in life, having a great financial plan can benefit you. With these five tips, you are sure to get set on your financial journey.