This is often not the first thing
one thinks about when starting a job. In fact, this is commonly one of the
last. The reason may be that it is perceived to be requiring a lot of effort or
sometimes found uncool or even boring to some. I'd admit that it is definitely
a little of all of these, but isn't everything? A little planning here can go a
long way into helping you achieve financial freedom.
Why is planning important?
Without planning, people generally
tend to go towards the extremes. This is rather true for all the aspects of
life. The easier extremes are more likely states of equilibrium. Anyways, as
far as budgeting and planning is concerned, there is one set of people who
don't worry about expenses at all and believe that if they tried to control
their finances they would in a way be trying to put constraints on their
actions and thereby limiting their freedom. And then there are those who go for
the other extreme and try to save every penny they can and eliminate all
possible expenses that are even slightly beyond what's absolutely a necessity.
These are the people who are trying to save up as much as possible and allocate
nothing to fancy up their current lifestyle in a hope that one day when they
want to go out and spend to live their life to the fullest, they will have
enough in their bank accounts. Both the extremes do people good than bad. For
the first case, it results in an unsustainable lifestyle that can cause
unnecessary stress as time passes and more realization of this fact grows. In
the second case, there is unnecessary stress at each decision making, when
trying to minimize and optimize all decisions. Stress is a creativity killer
and it's very good at its job, so something needs to be done about it.
How can Financial Planning help
reduce Stress?
The secret to any stress elimination
technique is to automate the things that we typically would spend hours and
hours of our life deciding about. By automate I just mean decide once and for
all. Well you might want to update your preferences. But it should only be
changes to the old plan and not a new plan in itself. Budgeting is a wonderful concept, as we'll discuss further. If we created buckets for each type of expense we are going to incur, we'll stop stressing about how to minimize the expense completely, and just have to spend wisely enough to keep it within the bucket that month. So, an expensive candle light dinner for two would be well deserved and enjoyable near the end of the month when you know it is within 'budget'.We obviously cannot plan for all the events of our life. But the basics remain the same for 99% of the individuals. Get a job, buy a house, get married, have kids, send kids to college, plan the retirement. Then we have some additions, depending on individual dreams. Somebody might want to open a school, a catering business, travel the world, go to space, and there are countless many. However, these dreams can remain dreams forever if nothing is done about it. Traveling the world for a year can be an expensive affair and close to impossible if you have never been planning for it and putting away little amounts of money each month. So, two guys who are dreaming about this, one keeps dreaming, and one keeps putting away 100 dollars a week for 10 years. After 10 years, the first guy is still dreaming while the second guy is now trying to decide where to go first and planning on how to spend the 52,000 dollars that he has been saving up for so long. That's how powerful even the intention of planning can be. So, how does it reduce stress? The feeling that with these actions you are always one step closer to your goal and never farther is a great one. It helps a lot
Where to Start?
I know there are so many resources
out there. So much has been written on these things that it all seems so
complex. Instead of reducing stress it has actually given stress to many people
who are starting out their planning process. They don't know who to listen to.
And even when some people are good to listen to, at the end of the day how many
of us go back and implement those ideas and work on those plans? The simple
truth is that it is very simple and everybody knows it too. I will try to blog
about some of the methods and my focus would be to provide you with practical
solutions of planning. Through some spreadsheets and planning tools, I'll try
to make it simpler for you, and we'll improve it as we go through the process
of planning together.
I have some topics in mind that
we'll go through one by one and I'd even like to cover some topics that you
might want me to cover.
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