Budgetary Control
The movement of cash across every aspect of our lives can bring joy, frustration, happiness, confusion and sometimes ignorance all at the same time!
Combine this with the ongoing burden of taxation and we come to one of the biggest areas of many people’s financial frustration. The monitoring and tracking of money is an area that we ensure our clients clearly understand, as without it the foundations of a successfully implemented Financial Plan can fall apart.
But what is budgetary control? Many people are earning good incomes, however they often feel like they have no control over their month to month expenditure. Perhaps they even use their mortgage as a means of managing their surplus cash, yet their loan balance never seems to reduce. There are three main steps that we focus on in helping you gain control:
1. Identify your total regular expenses.
2. Break expenses down into different categories (based on frequency and whether they are fixed or variable in nature).
3. Create an easy to manage banking/accounting structure that makes you aware of how much you are spending, on what and when.
A key to good budgeting is Debt Management. William Shakespeare wrote: 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be', but the fact is that debt can be a very useful tool – when used properly.
Whilst people traditionally think of debt as being a tool to help us buy the home we would otherwise never have afforded, debt can also be used to build a portfolio of assets that may improve the likelihood of achieving financial goals sooner.
Debt Management can help to: