A Financial Plan for Your Lifestyle

Which of these financial plans best describes your lifestyle?

Before we talk about your financial-lifestyle management type, we should first establish your goals and ambitions. If you don’t know where you want to be in 5, 10, 20 or 50 years, how can you possibly know if you are working towards it? If money was no object, what would you like to be doing right now? Once that is clear, you need to map out how to get there.

Lifestyle is the Goal

For some folks, their lifestyle is their goal. A young person who wants to be a doctor to serve the poor in an underdeveloped country can do so right out of medical training. It’s not likely that they will ever have much money, but they will have the satisfaction of doing what want. Money is not always the goal!

A Stepping Stone to Your Goal

Do you want to raise a family with relative financial security? You need to establish financial management plan as one of your goals. Not necessarily your most important goal, but you must still have a financial management plan that helps you to reach your other goals. Your plan would include providing for your family’s immediate needs; planning for short term and long term financial needs; creating a fairly hefty emergency fund; and finally planning for your retirement.

Plan for Success

Do you want to travel well, retire early, own your own home or any number of other goals that are somewhat costly? Now that you have a goal, you will need a comprehensive financial management plan, if you are to achieve success.

You must determine the financial resources that you will need to achieve your goal, and then create a plan outlining exactly how you will obtain those resources.

Then you will need to determine all the sources and the amounts of your income. This done, you will want to create a detailed income and expenditure budget. It should include provision for the goal or goals you have set for yourself and / or your family.

If you need help establishing or maintaining a budget, I have created a Free Budget Planner template.

Another great article and budget planner can be found at: the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada.

Please leave any comments on the article or the planner below, as they are most welcome.

As always, I am not a qualified financial advisor. I just relate financial management to my own experience which may not resemble yours at all. Advice is frequently worth exactly what you paid for it. Most of mine came from expensive experiences.