FYI, Personal Finance is a lifelong journey. With the right mindset, it can bring immense peace and joy. With the wrong mindset, it can be debilitating. The biggest tip is to give patience and grace during your “Personal Finance” journey. To both those around you and yourself. Along with Patience and Grace for all, these are the 10 next best personal finance tips for beginners.
#1 Education
Education can come through many facets and mediums. We all learn differently, and we should all allow for that. If you’re on this journey with a partner, friend, or family member, remember we all learn differently and at different speeds. Have patience and grace with those on this journey, with you and yourself. Some of the best tools I use daily are YouTube, Audible, podcasts, books on my Kindle, and physical books. Other resources like Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, and the like are also great. But can lead you astray. Not that all YouTube channels or books are perfect. They are more vetted and realistic than other resources.
#2 Define your Money Mindset
As mentioned before, your mindset is the biggest asset in your bag of tricks. Money Mindset is a vast and complex topic. I’ll try to whittle it down and focus on a few aspects of the Money Mindset as it relates to your Finance journey.
- Grit: Belief in yourself. Trust that you can pick yourself up. You can and will persevere. Know that you will overcome all obstacles no matter how difficult. You will push forward, even while not knowing the next step but taking the time to learn the next step.
- You are not your money: You are not defined by your money. Your history with money does not dictate your future with money. Money is only a tool in your tool belt.
- Positive Attitude: This one attribute can quickly change perspective in life. Having a positive attitude towards money can deliver your wants and desires. This slight change can mean a world of difference.
- “My Mindful Abundance.” I’ve coined a term over the years: MiBundance (or MyBundance), short for Mindful Abundance or My Mindful Abundance. When we think of abundance, we typically think of a lot of… cash, which can stand for wealth. Its broader definition is “an extremely plentiful or over-sufficient quantity or supply.” “Mindful” denotes awareness and attention (“attentive, aware, or careful”): couple those together and a careful, attentive, and aware of a highly plentiful supply. Show cautious attention and awareness of a particular supply that is directly tied to you means that we want to focus on what that supply is. That is where mindfulness comes into play. It must be directly connected to our moral compass, deepest desires, passions, and ethics. Make sure we pay close attention to what we want to become highly plentiful. Aware of the costs and offsets occurring when such a supply is grown. Careful in choosing what is truly meaningful. Aware of the effects on others and this world. Attentive to our needs rather than what this world and others on social media tell us they should be.
- Is Money your pure focus? No, or at least it shouldn’t be. Is it family? Time? Community? There are infinite possibilities as to what drives you. Money should be a tool to help you reach those goals and dreams. First, the focus is on what “supply” you want an abundance of. Next, we must consider what effect this abundance causes the world around us. How do our actions and habits affect people or the environment around us?
#3 Define your financial goals and objectives
Defining goals can be challenging. For so long, we have been trained to only think about money. How do we get more money? Stressing that we don’t have enough money. Let’s take a step back and focus on the end goal and objective. Is it to be debt free? Get out from under credit card debt? To start saving for retirement but can’t seem to get any extra money to set aside? We want this step to be as simple as possible to start. We want to write down a few bullets on our end goals. Right now, we don’t want to get too tied down on how or when we will accomplish these but just state them. You’ll want to revisit this step. After you’ve started your finance journey and worked through these steps, continuously track and adjust your goals. They will change. Sometimes because we achieve our goals and need a new one. Other times, the goals we initially aimed for have changed due to life situations or mindset shifts. You’ll grow to love this step and will want to revisit and make your own as time goes on.
#4 Write It Down: Income and Expenditures
We first need to understand where we are now to achieve any goal. One way to look at this is if you want to travel. Let’s say you want to go to the beach; you have to determine where you currently are to find the path to the beach. Are you in Oklahoma? Ohio? Florida? California? The starting point is kind of required when finding directions. The first thing Siri will want to know after you tell them where you want to go is where you are starting from. This step may take some time. Give yourself a deadline and work at it consistently. Set aside sometime every day until it’s done. Use paper or digital, whatever your preference is. Whatever makes it easier on you.
Income: Write down your monthly income. Make sure to list all sources of income. Side gigs, primary gigs, pennies found on the ground, etc.
Expenses: Write down your monthly expenses. Work through your bank statements, credit card statements, child care, subscriptions, mortgages, insurance, any liens against your paycheck or home, etc… Define where you want to go, know where you currently are, and plan on how to get where you want to be.
#5 Create an emergency fund
This step seems self-explanatory. We have all had this experience, yet, we push it off. Humans have a narrow focus and short-sighted vision by default. We focus on where we are getting food, shelter, a community for safety, etc… Once we have the necessities of life, we can think about how to keep them and prepare for obstacles along the way. Hence, the emergency fund. Its primary goal is to allow us to stay on the path that we’ve set up for ourselves. The goal is to make “emergencies” a hiccup instead of a devastating event that throws your life off course. It is another tool in your tool belt—a necessity for peace of mind. Once you have hiccups rather than devastation, we can focus on the next steps. What comes tomorrow, the day after that, ten years from now, and more?
#6 Invest in your future
Investing in your future is where things get personal. A lot of people think of investing as a very particular path. Have money, put money in the stock market, and make a ton more money. Though that is a way to invest money, it is not the only way. You can make it very personal, or it can also be very impersonal and standard. The common ones are some of my favorites because they can be easier than other investment types. But, I am passionate about the investments that are personal to me and think about them often. I find myself thinking about ways to tweak and improve them every day. Some people may find that too much work, which I can understand. But it brings joy to me. Finding joy in investing allows me to focus on my future more than on what I do with my money daily.
Some options for investing:
- Pay off debt
- Continued education
- Buying or renting books to increase knowledge
- Savings account, stocks, bonds
- Retirement account
- Real Estate
- Art
#7 Filter your Feed.
Block out social media. Stop buying stuff. How many times have you been traversing social media and come upon an ad for a travel bag you must have? You cannot begin to think about traveling without this bag. Or you cannot work out without this energy drink, this protein powder, or this recovery mix? You must travel to this “newly found” location. You must sign up for this new class to lose 20 pounds right this second. Social media, and sometimes, life in general, is one big advertisement. Our society is trained to buy more. Always be buying more. It’s your job as part of society to buy more. This is not true. It is a concept that to grow as a society continually, we need to be getting bigger, buy more stuff, get better junk, trash the old, and buy new. This profound economic concept allowed the US to overcome depression and stagnation throughout history. Still, we’ve grown to perfect it beyond what it was meant to be. It also does not consider the effect it has on our environment. Yes, we do need to think about our society, community, neighbors, friends, and family. But we need to take ourselves into account first. If YOU are not taking care of yourself, who is? Once we’ve established our platform, agenda, and game plan, we can open ourselves up to our community and society. We are doing this all while working within our boundaries. All that to say, filter your feed. Get rid of the “influencers” or creators that want you to buy more or are always trying to sell you something. Start following those that support your values and your game plan. That gives you room to grow within yourself and inspires you to do so.
#8 Talk to your friends about finances
Relax. I’m not asking you to divulge every dirty little secret about your finances. I am asking you to discuss generalities, goals, plans, hopes, and dreams. To open up as much or as little as you feel comfortable but, to open up. Talking with your friends about finances shifts your brain to feel more comfortable with the topic of finances in general. It allows for ideas and concepts to sink deeper into our being. Your friends and mindsets can increase the likelihood of sticking to your goals. It can decrease the chance of splurging on that fancy new toy or outfit you see together. Depending on your comfort level, you can have an accountability team. An individual or group that holds you accountable to your goals to check in daily, weekly, or monthly about where we’re at compared to where we want to be. These people can also be a great sounding board for when things go wrong. You can walk through why they went wrong and how you may find ways to improve, so the same opportunity doesn’t happen next time. There’s that common saying; you are what you eat. On the same notion, you are what you read, you are what you talk about, and you are the accumulation of your five closest friends. If 4 of your friends are big spenders, you are most likely to be a big spender. On the flip side. If you can create a mind shift within your peer group of friends, you could be on your way to financial freedom and have a great support group.
#9 Find a coach
“A coach just has a different perspective. Still to this day, the best have coaches because the coach can see what you can’t see because you’re in the forest, they’re outside of it.” – Hugh Jackman
All the greats have a coach; Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Jackson, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg, and so on.
Who, exactly, seeks out a coach? If you ask a coach the answer is usually the same: Winners who want even more out of life. – Abigail Pickus
We are all winners and deserve help to achieve our goals by working with a coach. A coach can help guide you through these top 10 tips for beginners and beyond.
- They can help set up an achievable and repeatable path toward success.
- They understand how emotions affect your relationship with money.
- They can help you develop the right mindset for financial growth.
- They can provide constant motivation to control your finances.
- They can help develop a strong financial plan for building wealth.
- They can provide consistent accountability.
- They can correct fundamental financial issues for lasting success
- They can help you can achieve greater happiness by seeing results
- They discover creative solutions to money problems
- They can help improve financial habits.
#10 “Wash, Rinse, Repeat,” Create Habits
We discussed nine tips to start your financial journey. The tenth is to create habits that set you up to succeed in everything we’ve discussed. Habits are going to look different for everyone. For some, it may be writing expenses down as they happen. For others, they may track them once a week on Sundays right before they game plan for the upcoming week. For investing, some apps round up to the nearest dollar on purchases, take the extra money, and invest it into a savings account. You could deduct money from your paycheck as soon as you get paid and pay your bills with it. For accountability and discussion with friends, you could create a weekly sit down or call with them. Having a scheduled time to chat can be freeing for everyone when we are all super busy throughout our week. It creates a time when you know what you will be doing—catching up, discussing goals, hopes, dreams, and what you did this week to get there, or where you may need extra accountability and help next week.
Next Steps
We discussed the top 10 personal finance tips for beginners. These tips will get you started on your personal finance goals. We highlighted the keys to each tip, which scratched the surface of personal finance. Once you’ve worked through these tips, review each in more detail. Read the in-depth articles for checklists and more tips. Watch the videos to understand how to get started and learn tips that will help along the way. Remember, you’ve already started with tip #1, learn and educate. Keep pushing. Set aside time each day and build those habits to continue down the path. The Law of Inertia states, “…an object in motion stays in motion…”. Keep striving, keep driving, and stay in motion.
