With so much thought and effort put towards losing weight as a resolution, at least for the first few months anyways, until you start to reduce the amount of times going to the gym until pretty soon every month the monthly fee is taken from your checking account but you haven’t gone in months. Do yourself a favor and put your resolution towards something more important: your finances. If you can prepare your financial resolutions now for 2018 you can be in a much better shape come this time next year.
Set Priorities
Whether it is saving money for a vacation, or putting together long-term financial goals, it’s is good to set priorities, and if you have a significant other you share the finances with, making sure you are both on the same page so you can work together to meet your goals. Take a budget for instance, if you don’t both work together on making sure it working on a monthly basis, it can make it easy to fall into your old spending trap and not be any further ahead than you are right now with your finances.
Give Yourself a Cushion
You never know when you have an unexpected auto repair, have to take the dog for a surgery at the vet, or even medical bills yourself, so it’s a good idea to have a cushion set aside so that you don’t have to put on a credit card when any unexpected charges come and risk going further into debt than you were before. If you can stash away a few months’ worth of expenses into an account and not touch it, you can have a nice cushion without having to worry about too much money sitting there not earning interest as it would in another account.
Become Debt Free
Once your carryover your statement balance to the next month it starts to accrue interest, and depending on your card could be upwards of 16% APR, which also depending on the balance, could be a huge payment each month. If you figure a balance of a few thousand dollars, simply paying the minimum balance will do little to chip away, so large payments will need to be made to get rid of the debt, also providing that you don’t continue to charge on the card going forward. You may need to tighten your spending budget or use cash going forward until the debt is gone.
Invest in Your Future
Whether it is opening a brokerage account and buying stock in cpxx, contributing to your work 401k account, or saving for your child’s college fund, are all great ways to invest in your own future, so that you can start early and ease the financial burden down the road when you will need to take advantage of every dollar you have saved in order to live off, because as we always hear, there may not be much social security to live off, so you’ll need ample savings to continue the life that you have now.