Financial Literacy

How this week at Praxis helped me up my financial game.

This week at Praxis we went through several exercises on finance. Here are a few of them:

Guess Your Budget

In this exercise I wrote down what I thought my budget would look like. I did not look at my actual numbers but just guessed my best.

The purpose of this exercise was to get me thinking about where I spend my money and to help me realize that what I think I do with my money and the reality of it may be different.

Set Up A Budget

A known fact in the financial world is that you cannot manage what you have not measured. Measuring your money can be a little painful at times, but avoiding measuring your money will not make it any easier to do so in the future. It is essential for financial health to measure your money.

Once I measured my money, then I could start to create an action plan for improving it.

Set Goals

Once I had a clear understanding of how my money stood, then I could create financial goals. Some things that I found helpful when creating my goals were:

• Setting time limits. Not just rushing through, but setting a time to deeply think about what I want my life to look like in the future and where my finances need to be to achieve that.

• Creating an action plan. When I created my action plan I found it helpful to have a specific number of points that I was going to come up with. Thinking about the top 3-5 action points that I could take to improve my financial wellbeing forced me to be specific.

• Consistency. Another exercise that we did in Praxis was to come up with a monthly exercise that we would do to improve our financial wellbeing. If it were not for this, I would probably forget to be up to date and consistent with my finances.

Final Thoughts

One of the most helpful things about my monthly exercise is that it gives me a chance to hone and adjust my goal and strategy as I go. It can be intimidating to make a big long term goal and the strategy for achieving it all at once. Because my monthly financial exercise allows for reflection and adjustment, I do not have to worry about making the perfect goal.

Check out the book review that I did this week on Mastery by Robert Greene!