financial zen

Blueprint For Financial Prosperity has an excellent write up about his prior addictions - from soda to bottled water, and how it’s important to not get hooked on “the higher end items.”

This is one of those areas that my wife and I are often at odds about - she prefers bottled water, expensive meats, and Jif peanut butter, along with other items that are more expensive (but are they necessarily worth it?) I, for one, enjoy eating the leaner cuts of beef, and made the mistake of buying cheap peanut butter once. I can’t recall the brand, or where it was from, but it was the most disgusting peanut butter I’ve ever tasted (and I’ve tasted military peanut butter, which isn’t half bad!) Water, on the other hand, I prefer to drink cheap. Until my last apartment…

Where we once lived, the tap water tasted like chlorinated pool water. We made spaghetti with it, and it tasted like chlorinated noodles. Brita water filters did nothing, so we took up to buying bottled water (.59 cents a gallon from Kroger’s). We drank a ton of water at the time (we were on Weight Watchers), so this caused a huge dent in our budget, up until we moved.

Thankfully, our current water off the tap (ran through Brita) tastes excellent - although my wife swears by country water, which makes me think of Homer Simpson - and in honor of bottled water “If it’s brown, drink it down, if it’s black, send it back!” - and in honor of Smashing Pumpkin’s new Album, Zeitgeist, here’s one of my favorite clips.

“A failure to plan is a plan for failure”

I don’t know about you, but I fell into the interest of personal finance from getting into reading blogs. The more I read, the more it intrigued me. It reminded me of the past experiences and money mistakes. Perhaps most people are put off by their lack of understanding terms - meaning they need to improve their financial literacy (the knowledge of facts, concepts, principles, and technological tools that are fundamental to being smart about money). This leads to most people learning about personal financial planning and developing and implementing a coordinated and integrated long-range plans to achieve financial success.

In planning, we hold ourselves responsible for our own success, happiness, and establishment of our security and standard of living (in the present and the future). It’s a huge part of our life that many people ignore until it’s too late - and then they learn from their mistakes, but it costs them (potentially) thousands of dollars, or wrecks their credit rating (which can potentially effect your employment, your mortgage, your car purchase… every financial aspect of your life). It’s my goal as I continue my education to get a better understanding and establish a better budget and mind set - I don’t mean miserly, I don’t mean “living like no other today so you can live like no other tomorrow” - I mean being able to save up for vacations without putting it all on credit, buying a car with cash, and using credit card arbitrage to its full potential. It’s a difficult premise, but then again, life isn’t easy.

The Six Steps to Personal Finance Success

1. Financial planning, focusing on establishing and achieving long-term goals through planning and budgeting,
2. Money management, centering on minimizing income taxes and efficient utilization of cash and credit,
3. Managing expenditures, especially for “big ticket” items such as vehicles and housing,
4. Income and asset protection through insurance, so that hard-earned resources and assets are not placed at undue risk,
5. Investment planning, with its focus on selecting the appropriate investment vehicles based on the objectives at hand and the relative levels of investment risk, and
6. Retirement and estate planning, with the ultimate goal of being able to live off of one’s financial nest egg and plan for transfer of assets to heirs.

It’s never just a simple process - fortunately we have trained professionals to assist. Certified Financial Planners can help you plan with these six steps, and Certified Public Accountants can help you get your finances together and straightened out. Over the next few months I’m planning on elaborating on these six points - from an educational stand point, as I am not a CFP, CPA, or any other TLA.