| IMHO the optimum financial plan depends upon your age and life situation. All require your family to work together and each member to grow in self-discipline. Here are tactics that worked well for my my family. 1. Learn to live below your means. This lets you build savings. The best tool here is a budget. Our family typically cooked at home, brought lunches to school or work, and bought staples on sale. Our kids had to choose activities that fit the budget. If it wasn't in the budget, we thought long and hard about buying it. If you need help, Dave Ramsey's books are good place to start. 2. Your next priority should be pay off high interest debt as fast as you can. If you have long term student loans, pay them down as best you can and start to accumulate (by saving) a six month emergency fund in an FDIC insured bank. The large percentage of families in the US where a $500 unexpected bill is a major problem is way too high. The emergency fund gives you breathing room. 3. Once you have an emergency fund, you should make sure to start saving for retirement and college for skill upgrades or for children. Someone once wrote that compound interest was the 8th "Wonder of the World". It is wonderful if we are talking about savings but is quite a taskmaster if we are talking about debt. 4. Become a self-directed learner. Invest time and focus in keeping your skills updated. Training budgets and travel to conferences were early casualties when my employer had major budget woes - that landed the company in bankruptcy. I paid my own way for critical training I could not get on-line. Some coworkers criticized me for this. I did what needed to be done. Those who didn't stagnated... I wish you well. This will not be fun at the beginning and there will be times in your life you have to put up with things you don't like but can't afford to fix now. We had 2 kids in college, and our kitchen cabinets starting to fall apart. My wife hated them. That was the first thing we fixed after the kids graduated (same day, 1000 miles apart - we each attended one...) |