Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Are You Leading Your Finances?

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This last weekend, I attended a young professionals conference.  As you can imagine, a large part of the conference was spent talking about leadership.  One of the speakers was legendary basketball coach Dale Brown.  One of the breakouts was entitled “Visionary Leadership”.  I’ve also just started reading the book “Entreleadership” by Dave Ramsey.  In all of those places, there are lots of buzzwords that describe leadership, and what a leader is.

Of course, this being a personal finance site, my mind couldn’t help but apply as much of it as possible to personal finance.  When we think of our personal lives, we rarely apply the word leader to any aspect of it.  We apply it to ourselves and others in our work and volunteer lives, but not our personal lives.  Why not?

When it really comes down to it, we are the leader of our lives.  We are the ones who apply the same principles that leaders apply to business and volunteer organizations to our lives.  Or don’t.  We try and become better leaders at work.  We expect better leaders to lead us.  But rarely do we try and become better leaders in our personal life.

Leading your Finances

Leading Your FinancesPersonal finance aren’t all that much different from a business and a business’ finances.  We still have income coming in, expenses going out, and the profit left over.  Unfortunately, for many, that’s where the parallels end.  Let’s change that.  Let’s apply some of those leadership principles to our lives.  Specifically, let’s apply them to leading your finances.

Financial Efficiency

Business leaders are always looking for ways to make their business and employees more efficient.  Over the years, businesses have foregone the paper and pen and replaced them with computers.  They’ve replaced old marketing tactics with websites and social media.  Leading your finances means finding, and embracing, new ways to make your finances more efficient.  Forego the old check and envelope method of paying your bills and sign up for bill-pay.  Or automate your bill paying by setting them up for auto-pay.  Find ways to save that also create income.  Look into better rates at better banks.  Learn about dividend investing.  Learn about peer-to-peer lending.

Financial Opportunity Seeking

Many of today’s biggest and brightest businesses wouldn’t even exist today if their leaders hadn’t been continually opportunity seeking.  If all Apple still made was computers, it wouldn’t be the multi-billion dollar company that it is today.  If Steve Jobs hadn’t seen the opportunity in the iPhone, iPod, and iPad, they’d be just another company making computers.  Apply the same to your finances.  Peer-to-peer lending hasn’t always been what it is today.  There was a time where it was still a fledgling opportunity.  A small percentage, relatively, of the population saw the benefit of it as an investing avenue, and, for most, their finances are the better for it.  Be open to services and products that can help you make your finances better.

Continual Financial Improvement

Good enough is never good enough for a business leader.  The only thing that stays the same is their desire for improvement.  Beyond always seeking opportunity, we must also always be finding ways to improve our finances.  We must always be assessing the risk involved with those new opportunities, and making decisions on what will best improve our finances.

Financial Failure

Businesses fail.  If they have good leaders, they only fail momentarily and spring back stronger than ever.  They’ll have set the company up to be diversified so that any one failure shouldn’t be enough to ruin the company.  Investors talk all the time about the importance of diversifying an investment portfolio.  But, it can be applied elsewhere in our finances.  Having all of your money in one online bank is great.  Until your internet goes down and you can’t get to it to bill pay.  Diversifying to have a set amount of cash available in an emergency can help you out there.  Not depending on just stock investments is another great way to diversify for failure.  Prepare your finances so that an opportunity that fails only sets you back, doesn’t bankrupt you.

How can you improve your finances today?  What opportunities can you learn more about and assess for use in your finances?  What efficiencies can you create to make your finances better? What other leadership qualities can you apply in leading your finances?

Taking Financial Ownership

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I was reading a story somewhere where a person was being interviewed about their debt.  In the interview, the person was speaking about how they had this credit card debt and how they just couldn’t get out from under it because of all the interest, fees, and other ways that the credit card company throws on the heap each month.  They went on to talk about how they were in fear of having their car and house repossessed because they were falling behind.  With each new problem, they were quick to point out the things that were keeping them back and causing their slide into bankruptcy.

Something occurred to me, then.  They were taking no ownership in their finances.  No matter what the financial woe was, it was always someone elses fault.  The credit card companies were tacking on interest and fees.  The bank was adding late charges onto their car loan and mortgages.  Not once did they take any ownership of their situation.  Not once did they say, “we shouldn’t have charged so much on the credit cards”, or “we bought more house than we could afford”. The blame was always on the other guy.

Saving is for wimps! I have a plan for affordable housing.If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my journey towards beating broke, it’s that it’s all my fault.  I signed that credit slip.  I signed that mortgage.  I signed the loan papers.  Yes, some of the credit card companies have interest rates and policies that border on predatory.  Yes, the banks will allow you to borrow right up to a point where you’re living paycheck to paycheck.  But, I signed on the dotted line.  Along the way, I discovered all of that, and I took financial ownership.  And, in doing so, I took control.

Through financial ownership, I have control over where my money goes.  I have control over which debt gets paid off first.  I have control of how tightly the purse-strings are held.  And, most importantly, I have control of my financial future.  A future that I plan to make as financially independent as possible.  Not at the whim and mercy of any bank, but a future where I can plan to buy things, and save money towards retirement.

My journey isn’t over, but I am beating broke.  I’m taking financial ownership and making my future one that is free from broke.

I want you be able to say the same thing.  It’s one of my goals for this site to help you beat broke.  Beating broke is the first step in your financial journey towards a life free from concerns over where next months bills are coming from.  You can do it.  But, you’ve got to take financial ownership.  You got yourself in the situation you’re in, and only you can get yourself out.  Do it today.  Accept that you are the only one that can take ownership of your financial situation, and you are the only one with the power to fix it.  Take that step.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Unautomate Your Finances

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Unautomate Your FinancesIsn’t that a funny title.  Even I had to double take to make sure that it wasn’t typed wrong.  But, yes, unautomate it is.  And the man with the plan is Adam Baker.  You likely know him from ManVsDebt.  Maybe not, but if not, you should.  And he’s got a plan to help you unautomate your finances.  From reading his blog, it certainly seems to have worked for him and after reading the review copy of the ebook, it might just work for a few of you out there too.

The concept is pretty simple.  Automating your finances can go to far.  It can cause you to “set it and forget it”. And that can lead to expenses getting out of control.  Which is where Baker’s Unautomate Your Finances comes in.  The eBook is 83 pages of wonderful advice for minimizing your financial footprint and living a life of controlled finances.  He’s got a pretty impressive list of bonuses that you can get when you buy the eBook too!  There’s two awesome interviews.  A video one with Leo Babauta, who writes a ton on minimalist living.  And there’s an audio interview with J.D. Roth of GetRichSlowly.com (And author of Your Money: The Missing Manual).  He’s also throwing in the templates that he’s created for the program’s minimalist budgeting system.  One in .pdf for printing and one in excel for use on a computer.  And finally, he’s giving you all the updates you can handle.

And he’s only charging you $17 for the whole shebang.  I know he’s planning on upping the price to $27 eventually (I don’t know when) so I wouldn’t wait too awful long if your interested.  This program could be a great thing for those of you who are feeling out of control of your finances and want a more simple way of getting them back under control.

You can read a bit more on the program and the eBook by visiting: Unautomate Your Finances

Disclaimer: I’m an affiliate of both Amazon and Unautomate Your Finances.  If you click through and end up buying either the books I’ve linked or the eBook from Baker, I will get a portion of that sale.  That didn’t sway my review, I really do believe all those things I said up there.  Affiliate links like those are how I pay to keep this site operating, so I appreciate when you do click through.  Thanks.