New Financial Plan

One of the reasons I don’t have a full financial plan yet is because I never felt I needed one badly enough to invest the time or money into getting it together.  That doesn’t mean I skipped planning, nor does it mean that I am behind in any way (I hope that’s true).  What I do have are general rules and goals that guide me with my money.  This is something I will need to review and revise as I go along.  It is hard to boil this down into easy guidelines.  For now I will list the ones I can think of, the keys that got me to where I am at.

1. Understand what works for you and what level of detail you want.  Like I said, up until now I was happy without a full financial plan.  I had enough ideas to guide me.  I have micromanaged some areas but been somewhat hands off in others.  I weighed our options on things like retirement savings, insurance, homes, automobiles.  We figured out what we needed and what we wanted.  We balanced pros and cons.

2. Set rules or guidelines to keep you in the right direction.  One of the things we want is to be well prepared for retirement, so we plan on setting aside as much as we can early.  We also decided to be frugal in general.  We use reward credit cards and pay them off in full.  We keep emergency funds.

3. Follow your rules, be consistent.  We have maxed out our Roths the last several years.  We have done well with reward credit cards.  We have always had emergency funds, which have come in handy.

4. Recognize and understand the risks involved.  I know where our money is and generally what it is earning.  I know the terms of my mortgage, auto, and student loans.  I have considered the opportunity costs involved in deciding things like should I use savings to pay loans early, or should I get a home equity loan to consolidate other loans.  I need to learn more about the deductibles and replacement value calculations for our home and auto insurance.

5. Get help when you need it, or even when you think you might need it.  If you aren’t sure if you need help it can’t hurt to get a second opinion.  It’s better to get help than to make a big mistake.

6. Invest both time and money.  This works for most things.  It is good for your finances, yourself, your family, building relationships.  If there is something that will pay off for you, consider doing it.  It can be worth buying better clothes, taking classes, attending social events, joining clubs.

I’ll have to revisit this.  The wording might change as I come up with new items, or reorganize them into points.

• Leave a comment... (1)

For now I’ll go by ‘planner’ simply because it fits the site.  This blog will track my progress making a financial plan, and I am remaining anonymous, at least until I figure out how much will be revealed when I get into details.

Here’s what I can tell you about my situation.  I’m right around 30 years old.  I am married with kids.  We own a house and two cars.  We have a mortgage, car loans, and student loans.  We also have a rollover IRA and Roth IRAs, and an emergency fund safely in the bank+CDs+US savings bonds.  We live on less than we earn, and have done better using what we have to prepare for the future than people we know who earn more.

My first goal is building our comprehensive financial plan.  I will be my own planner.  My second goal is keeping track of all the information I collect and organizing it.  I’ll do that here to help you understand more about financial plans as well.  I’ve been planning and tracking my personal finances for years.  I’ve also been studying personal finance, reading books, and finding out what is available online.  Recently I began reading personal finance blogs.

This site should end up as a ton of information, explanations, and examples, with some opinions thrown in.  It will be similar enough in style to the other sites so that it can be read along with them, but different enough in content to stand out as a new resource and new point of view.  I’m excited to get started.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Welcome!  Thank you for visiting.

For a long time now I have been tracking and planning my personal finances.  Recently I noticed, however, that I did not have a formal plan.  Being the type of person who likes to put the time and effort in to do things right, I am all set to start creating my own financial plan.  Along the way I plan on building a better understanding of financial plans.  Of course I plan on learning a lot of new things too, and filling in any gaps in my knowledge of personal finance.

When I started pulling together information it was coming from all over the place.  There are tons of resources available today, and by going online you can quickly come up with an overwhelming number of them at once.  Since I will be pulling together all kinds of information it makes sense to store it together in a useable way.  It will also be nice to share it with others.  So I am starting this blog to do just that.

I invite you to read along with my findings, share in my journey, and learn with me.  I believe learning works best when there is opportunity to share it.  Being a blog is perfect, you can join in when you want or read along anonymously.  I hope to share what I learn and to help you understand financial plans.  That is why this blog and I are here.

• Leave a comment... (0)