The Basics of Financial Planning: 5 Steps to Success

Financial planning is a major topic, so it can be helpful to break it down into the initial basics to get started. This way, it doesn’t become too overwhelming, wherever you are financially in life. Here are 5 steps to success with financial planning.

1. Create a Budget Based on Your Goals

Little is achieved with personal finances unless a budget is created. More than this though, using a zero-based budget that “gives every dollar a name” gets more specific by planning out the financial month before it gets there. Then, you can plan your spending around your goals.

By using this methodology, it’s possible to plan for how much you’ll save and invest each month. Initially, it will be small amounts and likely go towards short-term saving or debt repayment, but later these excess funds can be devoted to investing in order to grow your net worth over time. 

2. Reduce Expenses to Increase What You Can Invest

While increasing your salary by progressing up the career ladder is a useful thing, it’s not as readily under your control. However, what you can grapple with and control is what you spend. Monitoring and reducing your expenses is necessary to maximise how much is possible to set aside towards wealth building.

3. Reduce or Eliminate Debt

Debt is an indication of living beyond your means. When living this way, it’s impossible to get ahead financially. Delayed gratification is necessary to reduce spending on frivolous items which otherwise limits what you can save and invest each month. 

Once the overspending has ceased, address the debt by reducing it and eventually eliminating it. Start with the smallest debt first to build up momentum. Study and use the debt snowball to increase how effective you become at debt elimination.

4. Create Backup Savings in Case of Emergency

Building up savings in case of an emergency is a sensible idea. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a boiler going wrong unexpectedly, a painful tooth that needs extracting urgently, or something else. Surprises occur in life all the time and often they cost money to resolve.

By saving up an emergency fund, you can cover the outliers that will otherwise derail you. Also, begin to set aside money for repairs and replacement costs too. Things like home maintenance, car repairs, and replacement IT and mobile device costs come to mind. 

5. Invest Well and Often

Once you have sufficient savings in place, it’s time to put some of it to work for you. You can get involved with stock market trading dealing with CFDs and other options. Certainly, this can be a part of your overall investment portfolio. But you also want to leave space for fixed income and equities. This provides a more balanced approach to avoid the major seesaws of volatile prices which could put you off continuing to be an investor long-term.

Invest regularly to build up your various investing accounts to take advantage of opportunities when you discover them, whether that’s a temporarily out-of-favour sector of the market, a bargain stock, or something else entirely.

With some good financial planning, it’s possible to substantially improve your financial standing and create a compelling future outlook too. Failing to do so is likely to lead to the opposite outcome.