What are your Financial Values?
How well do you know your own financial picture? Want to get a better understanding of where you stand and how to improve? Where do you even begin?
Everyone has different financial values.
Sometimes, diving into your own financial situation to really understand it can be daunting, especially if this is new territory for you. There’s no need to feel overwhelmed. Start where you are.
Getting started can often be the hardest part, and you’ll feel more confident as you are more aware of where your money is and what it’s really doing for you. And when you can’t figure it out, we are here to guide you!
Financial Values Inventory
Financial behaviors are essential in maintaining financial well-being. Just as practicing healthy behaviors contribute to physical health, financial behaviors can help improve financial satisfaction.
To ensure financial success, financial values such as setting goals, budgeting, and savings can improve financial satisfaction.
By creating a financial plan that includes your financial values, you can not only achieve peace of mind and become more financially confident and secure.
Here are 6 financial behaviors essential to your financial well-being.
Evaluate Your Spending Habits
This is not advanced accounting. You have money going in and money going out.
- How much?
- How often?
- Are you overspending?
- Not saving enough?
- Where can you make adjustments?
At least once a month, sit down and look closely at your spending.
- Have you accumulated more video streaming services than you can possibly use?
- Has your restaurant spending crept upward?
- Have you accounted for saving for that vacation you’ve been dying to take?
Prioritize Your Spending
Having clear financial goals in place will help you stay on track when it comes to allocating your resources.
Create long-term objectives and then break them down into more manageable short-term goals.
For example, if one of your long-term financial goals is to pay off debt, decide how much you will need to dedicate each month from your budget in order to reach that goal. With each choice you make about where you spend or save money, prioritize spending habits that brings you closer to achieving these goals.
Create a Budget
Creating a budget is one of the most important steps when it comes to aligning your finances with your desired future.
Unfortunately, budgeting is viewed by many to be a grueling and impossible task. Of course, this simply isn’t true. Budgeting is actually very easy, and even easier with today’s technology.
A budget helps you track where your money is going and can help pay down debt or get a regular savings plan in place.
Once you have an accurate picture of what’s coming in and what’s going out each month, you can start to make adjustments where necessary in order to create more financial stability.
Streamline Your Accounts
Simpler is often better. Sometimes clients admit to squirreling money away in various accounts and institutions to “hide” it from themselves.
Or they’ve had multiple career moves and never got around to rolling over their 401K savings. With too many scattered pots of funds, it’s easy to lose track of the overall performance of your money.
Let’s minimize the number of accounts you’re working with to ensure we are minimizing expenses and maximizing opportunity.
Align With Your Values
Go through a list of values (there are many lists of values floating around the Internet, my favorite is from Brene Brown). What stands out to you as important? Circle everything that resonates.
Now go through that list again.
Put check marks next to your top 10 – maybe some can be grouped together in a broader category.
Give that a moment to sink in and go through the list a third time. Rank your top 3 values — what’s really most important to you? Now, look at your cash flow. Is how you use money reflective of your top values? Is how you earn your living aligned with what’s most important to you? If that doesn’t all align, why is that? What should change?
Make a plan. And stick to it.
Here’s where we come in. Let’s talk about your values and goals and put a plan together that will give you peace of mind about your future.