I hope, like many others, you’re keen to know how to improve your financial health.
These tips to improve your financial health will give your personal finances a significant boost if you’re willing & disciplined enough to implement them.
In fact if you are willing to take responsibility for your current financial position, good or bad, you will without doubt improve the quality of your life & self esteem by following these basic personal finance tips.
Furthermore, while it does not necessarily mean that you will have to live like a monk for the next year, it will however entail a bit of self discipline & applying sensible money management & spending habits.
So here we go…
5 Tips To Improve Your Financial Health
1. Get More Bang For Your Buck
This means that you should maximize the value you get from the money you spend by managing your money effectively.
So ensure that you take advantage of buying goods or services that you would buy anyway when they are on special or only buy from stores where you are registered with their rewards program.
In other words, informed shopping can help you save money without having to go without the things you enjoy.
In fact only bank with banks that provide a rewards program as the points you earn can mount up to a significant value that can be used for making essential purchases.
By taking advantage of all of these types of benefits you could realise significant savings on your monthly expenditure.
2. Save On Household & Car Repairs
Not everyone is a great handyman but with all the information on the internet there are certain repair & maintenance jobs that can be undertaken quite successfully yourself with a little bit of research.
For instance to buy & replace a blown light switch could be 10 times cheaper doing yourself than calling out an electrician.
The same applies to your your car.
Often simple problems, like buying & changing brake pads, or a battery, yourself can save you a small fortune. Just make sure that you are sufficiently competent to carry out these sort of jobs properly.
3. Avoid High Interest Debt
If you have to get credit make sure you negotiate the lowest possible interest rate. The variance in interest rates between different banks & lenders is amazing.
So, just remember that the higher interest rate, the more money you lose with absolutely nothing to show for it. It will pay you to be more diligent & careful when signing credit agreements without thoroughly investigating the terms & especially the interest rate.
Better than negotiating lower rates of interest for your debt would be to eliminate interest carrying debt altogether though.
Another important tip is to pay off more than the minimum amount each month – for instance on a home loan, by paying a little more than the minimum amount required you could knock off a complete year’s worth of payments without really feeling it.
This is because the extra amount you pay goes directly to the capital amount that you owe, ie it directly reduces the actual debt by the extra amount paid contrary to the minimum amount which is mostly allocated to the interest.
Furthermore, get a credit score check at least once a year to ensure that there aren’t any errors on it that would cause you to be charged a higher interest rate than you should be.
So always pay more so that the capital amount owing is reduced quicker.
4. Spend Less Than You Earn
This one sounds simple enough but most of the overly indebted consumers out there are in trouble because they continue to ignore this one basic rule.
I can already hear those who manage their finances poorly saying they cannot do this because they have too many monthly expenses.
My response would be that the situation you find yourself in is precisely because you ignored this principle & recklessly went ahead & spent your money with gay abandon signing up for extra credit here, there & everywhere.
Well the truth of the matter is that those who are going to be responsible with their spending habits & exercise restraint when it comes to signing up for extra credit buy that nice car, are the ones who won’t suffer the stress & humiliation of sinking in debt and having their cars & property repossessed.
If you are seriously over-indebted you may qualify for debt relief under the new Debt Intervention bill that could even see you having all your debt written off in severe cases.
If you’re already under review, here’s some information on loans for debt review clients.
So avoid financially irresponsible spending.
5. Trim Your Monthly Expenditure
Cutting down on your monthly expenditure is an obvious one but there are some less obvious ways to do this.
For instance stop buying that morning coffee from Starbucks on your way into work & rather use the company’s resources to satisfy your coffee need.
If this seems to trivial for you, get rid of your car as having a car, even without using it, is a money guzzler. It requires monthly insurance premiums to be paid, parking costs, maintenance, fuel & devalue with time – so definitely a very poor & costly investment.
So if you can use alternative transport you will save a small fortune not having the expense of a motor vehicle.
Another effective way of reducing your monthly debt is to consolidate it.
By consolidating your debt you should be able to get a lower interest rate & thereby save money and pay off your debt faster.
If you practice sensible spending habits you will end up having money to spend, live a stress free life (when it comes to money & debt problems) & create wealth for your future.
In conclusion, you can stop pleading poverty & telling everyone how broke you are by taking responsibility by implementing these tips to improve your personal financial health.