As we begin the New Year, the nation’s economy is crumbling. It is becoming apparent that protecting your finances is extremely important in addition to protecting your identity. To get you off on the right foot, we have listed several tips and suggestions to get your financial house in order.
1. Understand the difference between wants and needs. Being financially stable depends on you being a responsible spender. For example, paying your mortgage is a need, buy new clothes is a want. Being frugal is pertinent. Cut out coupons from the newspaper and pay attention to sales on things that you frequently need.
2. Put away 6 months living expenses into a Savings Account. Estimate 6 months of living expenses by totaling your monthly bills, gas, and grocery expenses and multiplying by 6. Put this amount of money into a savings account. Start by simply putting a little away every month from your paycheck. This will be your rainy day fund and should only be touched in an emergency. If you absolutely must dip into it, make sure that it is for an emergency and that you replace it as soon as possible.
3. Categorize your bills and start to pay them down or totally off. Start with personal loans, then move onto credit cards. It is important that these responsibilities be taken care of as quick as possible. The interest accrued by credit cards and loans is staggering over the span of the life of the loan.
4. Protect your Identity. Identity theft has become the crime of choice in recent years. It costs victims on estimated 6 billion dollars a year to pay for identity theft. You can protect your money and your identity with a service like Life Lock. Life Lock is a service that guarantees protection of your credit backed by $1,000,000 to you if they don’t. They help to reduce the amount of credit card offers you receive and pro-actively monitor your credit.
5. To keep away the temptation to spend all your hard saved money, put money into CDs other financial securities that are harder to dip into. That way you won’t have easy access to spending the money, and will therefore be less likely to spend it.
6. Get on a budget and stay on it no matter what. This is really simple to do. Label some jars or boxes with things like “savings” “eating out” or “entertainment”. Every payday, put $50 in each jar. That will be your allowance for that category until the next payday. When ever the money from one of the jars is used, you simply move to the next jar until you reach the next payday and can replenish. This sounds tough but it can pay off, literally.
The current world economy is in bad shape. That is no big, sensitive secret. As a result, we have already seen government bailouts of major companies we thought would always be there. Dont let that happen to you in 2009. Follow a simple budget, look for deals and just spend smarter.
If you are cautious with your money, you will not need a bailout in 2009. Hey, maybe you may be the one bailing someone else out.
Linda Seamore is an expert on the subject of personal finance and has written many articles on it and on credit protection services like LifeLock. She suggests researching all credit protection services like www.lifelock.com before signing up.
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