Mid-Year Personal Finance Tips Part 1

As the half of the year has just passed, summer is closer and knocking the door heavily, it looks like everybody’s started to evaluate where they are at with their New Year’s resolutions. Resolutions can be challenging to really attain — particularly in regards to your budget. Paying down debt and saving for your future might look overwhelming, and creating a budget only sounds dull. But if you follow a few basic tips, you can make it easier to keep up your finances as you planned.

Listed below, and in the following series of the same title, are some fast personal finance ideas you can use daily this summer to make it easy reaching your goals before the end of 2018.

List your debt out

First things first, you should know how much you owe to create a good strategy. Paying off debt may be a frequent target for the year, but step one is to create a listing of everything you owe.

Write down every debt, how much it is, and also its own present rate of interest. When you’ve your list finished, you can see the overall situation and look for a strategy to repay your debts or radically reduce them over the following 6 months, so you can achieve your goals.

Calculate how much daily interest you pay

If you have any debt on interest, at first it may seem a good idea to postpone to payoff; because interest rates are low and you may choose to hold cash in hand or spend it for fun. However, when you add up just how much interest you are accruing every day, you may think otherwise. Use this formula to estimate your daily interest:

daily interest = (current owed balance) x (interest rate) ÷ 365

Pay more than the minimum amount on your bills

Try to pay more than the minimum on bills each month. Even if it’s five bucks extra, it is going to help. If you let the “minimum payment” term confuse you, settling for the bare minimum makes you a slave to interest. Don’t forget, basically the interest rate is the rent you pay to the financial institutions for the money you borrowed; paying your debt as much as you can afford is a better idea rather than throwing the money in interest.

Put your savings in automation

Feel as if you can not manage to save? Here is a quick trick to start saving immediately: Regardless of how big or little, all it takes is setting up a direct deposit with your payroll. Or you can set up an automatic transfer from your checking account to your saving. Even if it is only $100 a month, it is definitely better than nothing. Think about it, if you’ve started putting aside $100/m since the beginning of this year, you would have saved $600 already. Isn’t that great?

Do quarterly reviews

This does not necessarily signify a whole financial overhaul every 3 months, but it might mean making little tweaks which in the future may pay off. In the current era of speed, life may change drastically in an event of an unexpected accident, job loss or death. Even a traffic ticket can disturb all of your plans and hold you from achieving your goals.

Included in the quarterly review, in addition to assessing your financial plan and establishing new objectives we advise considering your retirement savings and investment allocations.

Altering your budget can be rough, but do not allow the big picture get you down. By following these personal finance suggestions, you may take daily actions to enhance your overall financial situation easily.