How do you do financial planning Step by Step. Here is a step by step guide on how to do financial planning. Analyzing your current financial situation, categorizing your spending, setting spending limits, determining how much to save for a project, and forming an emergency reserve fund are important steps.
It is important to take control of our economic lives so that the subject of “money” is not a nightmare, but a source to carry out projects, realize dreams, and support basic needs and emergencies.
To do this, we need to devote time to financial education. The good news is that the first step is easy and can be done with a little knowledge gained from sources like this article.
This course is about personal or family financial planning. Learning how to handle the basics will provide the foundation for larger steps, such as investing in stocks, real estate funds, government bonds, etc.
How to do financial planning Step by Step
But first, as an essential part of the process, we will discuss how to do individual and family financial planning. Planning gives you an overview of your debts (accounts payable) and inputs (everything you earn/receive, including salaries, pensions, and earnings).
These three points allow you to visualize your financial situation and see if you are spending more than you earn or if you have paid all your bills and have something left over.
Regardless of the outcome, financial planning serves to develop strategies to get out of debt and set goals to achieve your future plans, whether good or bad.
Financial planning can also detect signs of poor financial management. But even in those instances, there is no need to worry.
Having this strategic perspective is the first step in organizing this area of your life. Pretty cool, right?
Let’s take a step-by-step look at how financial planning can help you take control of your and your family’s money.
Gather all your expenses financial planning
The first step to getting that current and future overview of your finances is knowing how much you’ve been spending and how much debt you’ve accumulated. Remembering that credit card installments are also considered a debt, as the limit is a type of loan granted by the bank.
In this way, list all installments in progress, financing, consortia, loans, etc. Gather the value of the installments and the total outstanding balance.
To gather information on how much you’ve been spending outside of installment debt, pick a typical month and list all the expenses you’ve had in that period. We consider a typical month to be one in which you have no emergencies, travel, or large non-recurring expenses.
The idea is that you can identify what you usually spend on and then consider that these expenses will be repeated in the short and medium term.
The list of debts serves to understand how much of your budget will be committed in the coming months and when you will be able to count on that part of your income again,
Classify Your Expenses financial planning
Once you’ve gathered all of this information, you’ll need to sort it into spending type groups. This recommendation is even given by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) in its financial citizenship notebook.
According to the BCB, expenses should be classified into:
Fixed expenses: refers to expenses that do not fluctuate or fluctuate very little. Examples include rent, internet, children’s school and college tuition, apartments, debt installments, and installment purchases.
Variable expenses: These are expenses that fluctuate considerably from month to month, such as electricity, water, gas, and market bills.
Within this category, categorize the expenses into “extra” and “necessary” expenditures. This classification is important to check the points in your planning where you can save money.
In other words, think of extra spending as spending that you can live without, such as home-delivered food, gifts and services, clothes shopping, and leisure activities.
Necessities are the things you and your family need for daily living, such as markets, basic services (electricity, internet, water, gas), rent, apartments, and education.
Add Up Your Recipes
Once you have listed and categorized all expenses, now review the money you receive each month (income). Include the salaries of everyone who contributes to your budget.
If you are doing personal financial planning, consider only your own income. If you are doing family financial planning, include the portion of income that each member allocates to the budget.
Classify Your Recipes
Like expenses, income can be fixed or variable. For example, if you receive a pension, work under a formal contract, or have a pro rata mule, you would talk about fixed income.
Variable income, on the other hand, can be understood as income from work freelancers or other payments that fluctuate from month to month.
Structure Expenses And Income In One Document
But if you don’t have much experience with spreadsheets, or simply don’t like working with this type of document, don’t worry. Financial planning can be done without them.
Good planning is something that not only brings an integrated view of the current situation and the near future, but it also works. And when we talk about finance, we need to make it easy and practical.
Many people avoid sitting down and looking at their accounts not only because they fear going into the red, but also because they find this task tedious and complicated.
Therefore, choose a format that works for you when summarizing your expenses and income on the same document. It should be practical and allow you to fill in several months’ worth of information in a row.
Some people structure their information in an Excel spreadsheet and have already automated the cells that add and subtract income and expenses. Others employ applications like Organizze, Guiabolso, or Mobills.
If you prefer to write with pencil and paper, do so. The key is to put everything that comes in (income) and goes out (expenses) in the same place in your monthly budget, so that you can look at the document to include and retrieve the information you need.
Conclusion
Whether it’s a spreadsheet, an app, or a single sheet of paper, financial planning serves to organize your budget. It gets you out of debt, fulfills your dreams, and creates an emergency reserve. With this tool, all of this is made easy.
As we have seen, creating one for yourself and your family requires collecting and categorizing monthly expenses, adding and categorizing income, organizing these data into documents, determining spending and project ceilings, and accounting for seasonality in salaries and expenses.
This step-by-step guide on how to do financial planning can be applied in individual and family contexts. For more tips on organizing your budget, keep reading the REVANEWS blog to find more content to boost your financial life.
