We all want to live a certain kind of life: free of stress, comfortable, able to fund the activities we are passionate about. Your personal finances are the rock to which all of your ambitions are tethered. If you run your own business, your personal finances become doubly important because they are, in turn, the bedrock of your company’s finances.

In this series, we have discussed the first two steps to better personal finances. Step one was to take a look at your relationship with money and how your experiences with money in the past are still affecting you today. In step two, we talked about how your lifestyle needs to be tied to your income in order to start a balanced financial plan. We also talked about how tracking the money you spend every month plays a critical role in that. The third step to better personal finances is to develop a systematic financial plan.

A balanced financial plan has a few key components. You need money to pay your bills, to pay yourself, to save, and to give. One way to break it down is to save 30% of your income, pay your bills with another 30%, spend 30% on yourself, and give 10% to others. Having a plan in place means if you were to come across an extra $100, you already know exactly what to do with it. You will put $30 in your savings account, stash another $30 away for bills you need to pay, give $10 to charity and then do whatever you want with the last $30. This organized system makes it easier for you to make smart financial decisions.

If you have a smart plan in place for handling $100, then you can handle $1000. You can handle $10,000. You could handle $1 million. If you made $1 million, you could spend $300,000 on whatever you want and still say you have a balanced financial plan. But to get there, you might have to start at limiting yourself to those measly 30 bucks now. It’s critical to limit your lifestyle to what you can afford. As you increase your income, you can exponentially increase your lifestyle cost.

The first two steps mean taking a good hard look at your financial situations, both the reality of it and how you feel about it. The third step is to get a picture in your head of what exactly you’d like to accomplish in this world. What kind of life are you dreaming of? If you get focused on your finances, you can make that happen a lot sooner than you might expect. The key is working with someone who can help you get there.

If you want you can setup a call to talk a bit about your business, the goals you’d like to accomplish, and what you need to do to take the next step. If we’re a good fit, then we can coach you through the obstacles you’re facing and make that lifestyle a reality.

Better personal finances in three steps are as easy as understanding money and your relationship with it, how money and your lifestyle are interconnected, and developing a systematic approach to balanced spending. If you need more help implementing these three steps, contact us today for more hands-on guidance.