Find Your Financial Zen
Disclaimer: This is not a financial advice. Just a sharing.
It's a fact: one of the things in our lives that stress us the most is our finances. In this forum that I attend through online webinar, there was several things and tips that allow us to find our financial zen (financial peace of mind).
One of the panellists, Jessica Brady, also a financial advisor, firstly highlighted a study regarding live satisfaction score correlate with well-sorted finance. Her tips: think about what we want to achieve and create plan of action around it. She also shared a few common pitfalls in doing budgeting. One of them is where a person is too detailed in budgeting – jot down every single money flow and all. Her tips: allocate a fix amount of money, for shopping as example. We can spend all the allocated amount of money, but don’t go overboard the limit of allocated amount.
Regarding emergency funds, Jessica stressed that emergency money is for emergency. Not for iconic sales or vacation. Emergency funds must be in easy liquid cash – meaning that it is not being invested so that it is accessible during emergency. Her tips: have at least couple month worth of emergency funds to get us by if bad things happen. She also recommends us to consider take up insurances as we, ourselves are a huge asset.
The moderator then asked an interesting issue; do one have to get their finance in order first, then do investment, or the other way around? Another panellist, Jessica Rayner responds by saying;
Do not wait till all of our ducks a perfectly in row before we can move’
Meaning that we can always start in investing even when our finance is still not in order. She fears that people will think that they were held from investing due to unsettle financial, they get choice-fatigue and never get started. If we start investing early, thousands of dollar difference there is than when we start invest when we are 50 years old. Much more different than that if we didn’t start at all.
Harrison also shared Raiz Invest latest product; Emerald, a socially responsible portfolio. The portfolio is where a deliberate effort is made by us, investors to invest in businesses that comply with our ethical philosophy. Not investing in firms that endorse or manufacture goods linked to addictive drugs (tobacco, gambling, etc.) is a common example.
In conclusion, they shared resources if we were to explore more in financing. The resources are as such; Money: A Love Story (Book by Kate Northrup), The Clean Money Revolution (Book by Joel Solomon), https://raizinvest.com.au/ (Website) and She’s On The Money (Podcast).