12-Minute Financial Makeover Step 6 - Ease Your Mind with Debt Freedom Plan

This is the 6^th installment of our Financial Makeover Series featuring carefully selected personal finance subjects. We hope talking about these basic principles can allow you to figure out what can help the most in your own unique situation.

We talked about avoiding fees in Part 1 and how using a no-fee online checking account could help you so.

Part 2 featured spending more on things you truly love using a fun budget approach.

We continued in Part 3 with the amazing freedom of budget choices that can allow you to realize more of your projects and dreams.

Part 4 talked about emergency savings and having a personalized contingency plan.

Part 5 suggested to hammer down boring big recurring expenses.

After these, we now feel ready to abort an even more challenging subject. So, let’s put on our armor, sharpen our sword and face on the dreaded debt beast.

 

The Right Mindset

Having too much debt is probably today’s biggest financial problem of too many families. We did not start our Financial Makeover Series here because we believe it’s better to have developed some tools before tackling on dreaded debt.

 

With some confidence in your abilities, getting out of debt can be quite straightforward. You just have to allocate money in the right way to achieve it.

 

We know getting out of debt may seen difficult or even impossible for some. Many are even addicted to debt. They know extensive use of it is bad for them yet became comfortable bathing in it. Sadly, they are so afraid about getting into that battle.

 

But after you get over that steep psychological hurdle, getting rid of debt becomes basic math. You have to believe and decide you can get out of debt. No one can do it for you. You have to commit and do it for yourself and your family. The good news is that you have that power in you.

12-Minute Financial Makeover Step 5 - Slash Boring Expenses to Relieve Pressure

Our Financial Makeover Series features carefully selected personal finance topics. We hope talking about these basic principles can allow you to figure out what can help the most in your own unique situation.

In Part 1, we discussed avoiding fees and using a no-fee online checking account.

Part 2 pointed out how no-fee savings accounts and a fun budget approach could allow you to spend more on things you truly love.

We followed up in Part 3 with budget choices and the amazing freedom it can provide to realize your projects and dreams.

Part 4 suggested to start and build up emergency savings in accordance with your own crap-happens plan.

Today we’ll talk about expenses and propose ideas, hopefully inspiring, to reduce them.

We know a lot of people have a very hard time cutting down their spending as it can be simply too painful to them. But oftentimes, just focusing on boring expenses can give you the spark and motivation to get the slashing process going.

Getting More of What You Love

As we already highlighted in Part 2, getting more of what you love is the key here. So, try to focus on getting more resources like precious time and money!

 

On the cash front, reviewing your expenses and slashing unnecessary ones can be a straightforward way to free up big bucks to attain more of that.

 

An even more motivating approach is to concentrate your expenses carving on the boring kind. After all, cutting down on expenses that don’t provide you much joy should be much easier.

 

Working hard to tackle down your expenses should also help take out much of the guilt associated to spending. Enjoying more of what you love is not a sin, especially if you worked hard to achieve so.

 

As you can see, boring-expense money could provide some leeway and ultimately allow you to spend more on what you love. That’s plain and simple!

 

Fun Right After Necessity First

 

In all of this, you still have to prioritize essential spending.

 

You have no choice to spend some money on what you and your family, essentially need. There’s no way around it.

12-Minute Financial Makeover Step 4 - Keep Cash Flowing with Crap-Happens Plan

Our Financial Makeover Series talks about personal finance basics and lets you figure out what applies best to your own unique situation.

In Part 1, we pointed out to avoid fees as much as possible, especially the devastating recurring ones. We also suggested to open a no-fee online checking account.

In Part 2, we followed up by proposing to use no-fee savings account to organize the projects that provide you pleasure. We insisted on how budgeting can allow you to spend more on things you truly love.

We continued on a similar theme in Part 3, telling you that budget choices can make you feel awesome and emphasized on how it could provide you more freedom.

This time, we’ll talk about another way to liberate yourself from financial worries setting up a solid custom-made contingency plan.

In the financial realm, we often hear about that basic concept to set up a rainy-day fund. Some might argue that their financial days are already rainy, if not stormy.

But we really believe starting an emergency fund can be a great first step to getting out of the hazardous living-paycheck-to-paycheck spiral.

The object is not to obsess about risks. In fact, your own crap-happens plan could allow you to forget about possible misfortunes and free you up, allowing you to truly taste and appreciate life joys and ventures.

Try to Get Money Worries Out of Your Way

We know many of you worry about money even in normal situations, some even worry about finances all the time.

The main objective of the financial aspect of your contingency plan should be set enough money aside to allow yourself to focus on living through tough situations and fixing things for you and your family. Your contingency fund should allow to relieve financial pressure as much as possible in these bad situations.

It’s impossible to anticipate all eventualities, especially the worst ones. But, having some and enough money stashed away for those bad periods sure may help to cope with any situation. No matter how bad it can be.

For instance, losing your job can be very tough both financially and psychologically. Yet, having money aside should at least give you some time to get your act together and focus on finding a new job.

Another example would be if your fridge or car breaks down. Most people often have to move heaven and earth just to scratch sufficient funds for those kinds of repair. The actual hassle of just getting those things fixed is bad enough. At least get the money part of it out of your way.

Because it’s Much More Than About Money

You don’t have to become survivalists, but your contingency plan has to be more than about finances. For instance, everyone should have a plan in place to survive at home for 3-4 days.

12-Minute Financial Makeover Step 3 - Savour Freedom thru Budget Choices

Our Financial Makeover Series talks about personal finance basics and lets you figure out what applies best to your own unique situation.

In Part 1, we suggested to open a no-fee online checking account. The point is to avoid fees as much as possible, especially the devastating recurring version.

In Part 2, we talked about the pleasures of budgeting and how it can allow you to spend more on things you truly love. We proposed a no-fee savings account as one tool to organize in that fashion.

Today, we’ll talk about how budget choices can make you feel great. We hope you’ll see it can be an amazing way to exercise your freedom!

The Wonderful Power of Budget Choices

For most people, budgets are boring and restrictive. For us, our budget is fun because it helps us make wise and sometimes tough financial decisions so we can realize more of our dreams.

Try to view your budget as an essential versatile tool at the heart of each of your personal finance decisions. It’s the ultimate key to make everything work together. It’s not only about dollars and cents but rather more about dollars and sense.

As clearly as possible, your budget should be a concise representation of your financial reality and should help you manage your financial operations. Many may be afraid to face that reality and suffer from guilt. They prefer to live in denial and stick their head in the sand than to truly find out the extent of the damages.

But a budget can be the most efficient tool to know where you stand and the best way to start doing something to make things better. Your budget can give you the means to improve and help you take back power over your finances.

After retroactively accessing your present situation, an efficient budget will highlight your options to choose and can be the first step towards your financial well-being.

The objective is not to become perfect but rather to have the means to take decisions that can make things better. At worst, you’ll know more about the impacts of your financial choices.

Like we elude to in our last post of this series (Part 2), ultimately, budgeting should and can allow you to spend more money on things we truly love.

The Questionable Anti-Budget Cult

For many people, keeping a budget seems appalling. Some are even utterly against any form of budgeting. They think a budget will only limit their freedom. They prefer to let money flow.

12-Minute Financial Makeover Step 2 - Enjoy More of Whatever You Like with Budgeting

Our Financial Makeover Series talks about personal finance basics and lets you figure out what applies best to your own unique situation. In Part 1, we talked about avoiding fees and their potential devastating financial pitfall. We also suggested to open a no-fee chequing account to get out of the perpetual monthly banking fee rip-off.

Today, we’ll continue to try to bring excitement to what many consider a tediously boring subject.

Like many, we used to consider budgeting like a restrictive thing. Plainly put, expenses were bad, and income was good. In practice, it mostly translated into trying to have less expenses. At some point, it could also transform into working more to have more income. With that perspective, budgeting was no fun at all.

It was like being on a strict diet all the time. Spending would be like eating. Although some of it is essential to your survival, too much of it is plainly bad. It can either get you fat or poor. With that thinking, discretionary expenses like desserts and treats can be devastating to your wellbeing. In the same fashion, exercise can be compared to income. Regular doses of it can get you in better shape. In the end, this only meant a lot of sacrifice.

Because I liked numbers, I still found some pleasure in it. But to be frank and despite some success, our penny-scratching restrictive budget was a torture that kind of got lost in all the spreadsheets. No insane person would get excited about it. Nobody was really interested to get involved in it either.

Fortunately, our way to budget transformed over the years. It’s now more about pleasure. It’s much more motivating knowing it allows us to get and do more of what we love. We finally realized that, after basic expenses, we could do whatever we liked with the rest of our hard-earned money.

So, to expose our renewed point of view, this post will be about the pleasure of budgeting. We hope you’ll discover how you could enjoy life more with clever budgeting.

Next time, we’ll talk about when we were kind of halfway there with our previous approach that still gave us significant power over our finances thru sensible budget choices.

An Efficient Tool to Boost Your Fun Level

One key to make budgets attractive is to put some spice and fun into it. Wouldn’t it be great if your budget allowed you to have more fun? The great news is that it truly can!

12-Minute Financial Makeover Step 1 - Promise to Combat Chronic Strain of Fees

Welcome to our 12-Minute Financial Makeover Series. This is the first installment of our usual twelve. If you commit to it, this series could be a great way to get your financial affairs in order.

Because of its personal nature, we don’t believe in easy one-size-fits-all financial solutions. General principles will always apply but you will have to adapt them and decide what to implement in your family’s unique situation. So, don’t expect things to fall straight into your lap.

In that regard, we will propose some homework at the end of every post of the series. Our intentions are to only provide guidelines and clues on what you could work on and think about for each theme. You should have plenty of time to accomplish what suggested between each article. We even think each step could be achieved within a week. In that sense, if you discover our series after its original publication at the end of 2019, we recommend one stage a week to get you through the whole financial cleansing process within 12 weeks.

So, let’s immediately get to our first enlightening subject!

One Simple Financial Truth to Teach Our Children

To tell you the truth, fees were not our intended original subject. But it all changed after we let our teenage daughter have her first few experiences with money. Let’s just say she already has had a few run-ins with some intricacies of our financial system. Let’s now tell you about some of it.

For her 12^th birthday, she received from a friend, a 25$ cash gift card that initially seemed quite nice. But we were surprised when we realized it cost 2$ just to activate the card. We were even more astonished about the 1$ monthly fee to keep the card. Let’s just say she quickly got rid of that insane-fees card.

A few months after that, a school trip was her first chance to use her brand-new bank card. Our local bank rep had told us it would work fine to shop in the US. But after the card was refused at a few shops, she reverted to an atm machine that charged her an absurd 7-dollar fee to get some good old cash to pay for her modest purchases.

After she got back, we helped her look at the fine prints to realize she almost got lured in the big bank monthly fee trap. Her account is free to start but will become quite expensive after she turns 18. Hello high monthly fees!

We know financial institutions don’t always have your best interest at heart. After some more research and reflection, we recognized fees are everywhere and can be very harmful to your financial wellbeing. The good news is that alternatives exist to fight them.

This led us to one fundamental question: to get your children well started in their financial journey, what financial truth would you want to teach them? Our humble answer is to be extra wary about fees. They can be your worst financial enemy. Fortunately, they are often simple to avoid.

Note here that we assume kids know some basics like money is limited, you can work to earn money and you can buy stuff with money.

Ultimately, all those little misfortunes made us realize how costly fees can sometimes be. The good thing is that you can mostly avoid them. And that modest truth may be at the core of broader financial wisdom.

We have gradually become aware of senseless fees with experience. Now, we can even say we have developed a fierce aversion to them. As we get a little deeper into it, let’s hope we can make you realize the recurring ones are the worst kind and that low investment fees can be a crucial key to your financial success.

Coming soon!

Being avid Disney fans, 2019 is a great year as a lot of promising Disney movies are coming out. Among others, a live-action version of Dumbo will be released next week. These live-action remakes seem to be the new trend. Hence, we will be able to envoy bigger-than-life re-creations of Aladdin and The Lion King in upcoming months.

Just to name a few more, this prolific year will also give us many brand-new releases from the Marvel franchise, the long-awaited beloved-among-young-girls animated Frozen 2 and the next installment of the Star Wars saga in December.

Speaking of the popular franchise, looks like Disney will manage the open a little ahead of schedule, its out-of-this-world new Galaxy’s Edge or Star Wars land both in its California and Florida parks. Let’s hope this ambitious project can live up to insane expectations. Early preview looks sure appear very impressive and promising.  

It’s also an amazing year on the personal side as we are going back to Disney sooner before all that frenzy. We will wait till things calm down to visit new Stars Wars installations sometime in 2020.

I’m also on the verge of my next 8-month leave of absence. I regained almost all my motivation at work after recent management changes. It was too late to change dispositions of my upcoming leave, but we hope current negotiations will break through and allow me to continue working on a reduced schedule after that. I would like to have shorter but more frequent time off. Coming back after long leaves like 6 or 8 months can be tedious. Some vacation here and there coupled with 4-day weeks during slower periods would be much more suitable to everyone as the organisation would not have to deal with repetitive not-practical replacements.  

We are glad to announce that all this free time will allow us to work on an exciting project that has been broiling in our mind for a while: our 12-Minute Financial Makeover Series. This series will try to provide simple and efficient guidelines to improve and put your financial affairs in order. Look for it in the next few months.