As we can be our best assets, we need to improve ourselves. We need to increase our market values. But how can we do that? We can do that by increasing our knowledge and education – formal or informal depending on our necessity. If you are an employee, it is just advisable that you get higher education (master’s degree, certification, etc.,) to aid your promotion. If you are an entrepreneur, you can also get higher education like MBA or the like, attend trainings and seminars or just conduct your own research to develop your business.

The fruits of education are these: if you are an employee, you can get a higher salary and if you’re an entrepreneur, you can bring your business into progress. Moreover, if you don’t have the both (business and employment), you can gain the capability to have one of them or both if you become educated. Knowledge also brings skills. Skills can give us opportunities to earn money and solve financial problems.

Education helps us reinforce our finances. It can also boost our earning capacity, orient us the discipline to control our spending, and teach us how to save and invest our money. Sometimes our financial world is dark and uncertain. But because of knowledge, we have light and calculations that give us almost precision. Therefore, education cannot be ignored. It should be prioritized just like how we prioritize our selves. There are many books that can be read. There are many reliable articles on the Internet where you can get the wisdom to manage your finances. We should not stop from learning. We should not stop and claim that we are already wise. We should be like that if we don’t want to be called fools. Remember that foolishness can lead anyone to shame.

Wise people are humble. They also live in modesty. These attributes keep them away from excessive expenses and unwanted debts. Apparently, foolish people are boastful and live in extravagance. Consequently, they lose most of their money and they fall into the trap of debt. By having wisdom and knowledge, we can have the information and cautions we need to plan strategically. We can set effective procedures that will help us achieve our financial goals. Finally, we can learn the principles and behaviors that will fortify our personal finances.

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1. Personal Finance Tips #5: Be Diligent
2. Personal Finance Tips #6: Forget the Money
3. Personal Finance Tips #3: Be Honest

Now, why I am saying that one practical personal finance tip is to forget about money? I’m telling this, because I want everyone to focus on becoming great instead of concentrating on money. The Bible even said, seek first the kingdom of God and all these things be will added to you. This means let’s seek first for greatness rather than things which do not last forever. Becoming great is a combination of being humble and one who serves God and His people. But how can greatness (humility and service) can help us stabilize our personal finances? Simply, if you become great, you will bear greatness.

By becoming great, we can avoid financial troubles – even long-term and permanent troubles. In earning money for example, when you work great in your business (serving your customers well, treating your employees the right way, and becoming responsible to the government), you will be assured that your financial condition and operation will have a bright future. Just imagine if you will just concentrate on money. For example, if you deceive your customers to have bigger profits, give unjust compensation to your employees just to cut your cost, and practice tax evasion just to save more money – what will happen? Do you think you will prosper? But of course you can be financially successful. But that will only be temporary. You customers will not return to you, your employees may leave you, and the IRS may impose tax penalties on you. The consequence will be a great financial tragedy for you and your business.

How about if you are not a businessman? Let us say you’re an employee. The virtue of greatness still applies. If you concentrate in doing great to your job, performing well and having the best results, there will be a huge chance that you will be promoted and will receive incentives and bonuses. Thus, helping your financial capability to be strengthened. Moreover, if you will not boast and will stay humble, you will be exalted and win bunch of good friends. These true friends that will be yours will help you in any aspects of your life, including the financial aspect of your life.

If you wish to get out of debt, greatness also applies effectively. Often, people, because they don’t want their money (even their last money) to leave them, they don’t pay their debts responsively. A responsible person does his promises, including his promises to pay his dues. That’s why if you want to really extinguish your liabilities, you should do great in doing your vows. You should not just focus on keeping that money in your hands, but you should concentrate in preserving your word of honor, as well as your credit score, which are beneficial to both of you and your creditor.

Therefore, concentrate on becoming great in everything you do. Sometimes or even most of the times, you must forget that money. Be great and be righteous, and money will not leave you – even if you will not focus on it. Don’t hold your money too tight, so that it may flow freely, and return to you voluntarily – giving you the freedom you have first given to it.

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”Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.” – Proverbs 10:4 (NIV)

Diligence is important as an action is important to accomplish every task or plan. Intelligence is good. Yes it is good because we need to be wise in making our financial planning and in designing our steps and procedures in managing our personal finances. However, this wit is inadequate without putting them into actions. Using our brain is good, but without using our hands, it can never be better. Even if we have the confidence in our hearts to succeed in our financial life, it will only come short if we will not walk the talk. Remember that faith without deed is dead.

Our financial program is composed of a good plan, nice goal and a series of effective steps to achieve that financial goal. In this program, the steps are very important – and we can only walk all the steps if we are constantly diligent. We need to do what we think. We need to realize what we feel. We need to work for the things we want to achieve. The debts we want to extinguished must be paid by our earnings. These earnings should be the fruits of our consistent labor. If we only think of repaying the money we owed, but never work for the money we will be using to pay off those debts, we will just find ourselves still slaves by lenders.

In saving money, our actions play a very important role. It is our hands that hold, make and or spend our money. In order that we can save money, we should increase our income by working more. We also need to control our hands not to spend excessively.

In investing money, especially when we invest it to our business, diligence is our key to success and prosperity. If you will refer to your financial statements (balance sheets or statement of financial position and statements of income), you will find in your balance sheet that equity increases when your income increases. If your equity increases, your asset may also increase, and your liability may be decreased. Take note that the statement of income, which is also known as the statement of performance and results of operation, reflect a company or an individual’s performance and results. This just means that the success of a business or financial activity indeed lies on our performance and results – which are the manifestation of our works and our diligence.

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Many people, although they have a good financial plan and procedures to achieve their financial goals, still fail. One mail reason is… they don’t perform their very best. They take those plans and steps slightly, and sometimes they take them for granted. This happen because they don’t stand on the things they have laid.

All plans must have a goal. This goal must be an important goal for someone not to take it insignificantly. Hence, in every plan and goal we make, we must always ask ourselves – why are we doing this plan? Why do we want to achieve those goals? How important it is to achieve them? By assuring that a plan and its goal are very important to our lives, we can also assure that we will do our best to execute that plan and achieve its goal.

In setting up our emergency fund, we should also put some value on this fund. Because if we won’t, we might just lose it. This must also apply to all the funds and allowances we build. We must hold them tight, protect them, and nurture them – as if they are very important to us. We can also think of some important things to become the reasons why we are doing these financial activities. These things can be the most important people in our lives. They can be our love ones, our children particularly. The educational fund you are building up can be very important to you, because you love your children. The emergency fund you keep can also be very significant to you because you don’t want your family to face financial troubles in the future.

One major personal financial goal you can desire can be your release from debts. This goal must also become very important to you. This means, you need to become serious in eliminating those amounts you owed. You need to pay them on time. This also means you need to do your best effort to find and earn money to repay those debts.

By putting pure value on everything we do, we can set ourselves on fire and attain success on those things. Remember that what we don’t hold firmly – can fall from our hands. Thus, we must stand on every plan we create, in every steps we make, and in every goal we want to achieve. We must place a great importance on them. We can do that by linking them to important things in our lives, like our love for our family and other loved ones.

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So how is your personal finance doing? Do you have many debts and don’t have financial stability? If yes, what do you think is the problem? Have you been an honest person all these years? Maybe you have obtained a loan you know you can never pay? Or you have not done your vows or promises to pay your debts, resulting this to double your debts because of interests and penalties?

A simple piece of dishonesty can bring a person lot of financial troubles. People who can hardly say “no” or refuse or resist a thing that should be resisted often slide into a whole financial mess. I remember one person who didn’t have enough money in his pocket or in his bank account. He was encouraged to have a grand birthday party by his friends. Because the man cannot be true to his self, he did not say no to them and he gave his vow to realize that party. Consequently, he resorted to creditors and owed money he could never afford to payback. Eventually, the party happened and the increase in his liabilities also occurred. With that story, we can tell that should he became honest to people and unto himself, he should have escaped lots of debts.

Dishonesty is also common in paying taxes. Many people, who wish to save their money, don’t pay the right taxes. They resort to tax evasion which is a great practice of lying. These people gain temporary financial relief because they don’t pay bigger current taxes. However, as the IRS conducts audits, these people are caught with more penalties. That means more expenses which result to additional financial burden.

To strengthen our personal finances, we should also strengthen our attitudes and behaviors. This includes strengthening our virtue of honesty. As we all know, the truth will set us free. The truth and the light can give us financial freedom and stop us from becoming slaves of our creditors. Honesty is difficult to practice, but if practiced constantly, will truly help us in gaining our financial stability. Therefore, let us embrace in our everyday conducts that honesty is still the best policy – even in our financial policies.

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Prepare your pocket
First, because we are talking here financial matters, we need to prepare our pocket, our wallet, our bank accounts, or our financial capacity. In times of financial crisis, we should see to it that we have built an emergency fund which we can get funds to help us pay our emergency expenses. Setting up an emergency fund can be done gradually yet it should be consistent. We can also place that fund in a savings account to earn interests yet still unrestricted. We can also save other things aside from money that can help us in times of financial crisis. These include stored foods and supplies, which we can spend while you still don’t run out of bucks.

Prepare your mind
An alert mind is a great mind. A financial crisis is an occurrence that is irregular. In times like this, we need to have our mind prepared for this tough situation. That’s why we should fill our brains with all the advanced personal financial solutions we can use when financial troubles happen. This can be done by making strategic plans, budgeting and forecasting.

Prepare your emotions
If we need to set up our mind for the anticipate crisis, we also need to prepare our emotions. Our emotional behavior can play an important role in difficult financial situations. We cannot ignore our feelings, especially because this is our human essence. May people who are emotionally weak usually don’t survive a very hard financial condition. Our emotions, when properly manage and control, can give us the strength and courage to face any battle, including our financial battles. Moreover, they are also our tools that supply us inspirations and will-power to do what is right and what is excellent.

Prepare your people
We also need to prepare the people around us who have significant impacts in our lives. These persons may include our families, relatives, close friends and other people who can affect our financial lives. Your children for example, who need your financial support for their education, should be taught and be ready for the effects of the coming crisis. The importance of preparing the people around you for the coming financial storm is to make them people that can help you survive the disaster instead of letting them become additional burden that will add weight to the crisis.

Prepare your hands
Last but not the least, we need to prepare our hands. This means we need to prepare ourselves to do and execute all those planned actions we have prepared for the crisis. Since we may be losing money when crisis comes, we must assure that our hands can actively work and find money to cure the coming financial troubles.  Although we have prepared mind, heart or people around us, if our own hands are not prepared, expect that failure will still come to us. Hence, let us set our hands in fire during the cold and rainy days.

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Planning
To achieve our financial goals, we need first to plan strategically. A plan is a set of objectives and procedures which aims to achieve an objective by executing the necessary procedures to achieve it. In the personal finance world, planning may include creating a financial plan. This financial plan may include budgeting and setting an emergency fund. We need to exercise reasonable calculations and estimations to get ahead of time. We can manage our finances in advance through planning. Advance planning reduces the risks of cramming. An example of planning is calculating your next month’s revenues and expenses and then putting and plotting them in papers or spreadsheets. With this, we can have a comprehensible picture of our financial status for the succeeding month. If we foresee a problem, we can find solutions for that problem in an early period of time. Planning can also help us compare our planned financial figures against actual results. This way, we can analyze our strong points and rooms for improvements.

Organizing
Organizing is arranging our things in the proper order. This practice includes the classification of resources, obligations and expenditures for a more efficient financial flow. We can classify our finances according to time (short-term or long-term), size (amounts of money) or priority (according to importance). By proper organization of our finances, we can efficiently carry out our financial plans. An organized person has the better chance of achieving financial success than a disorganized person. This function of management prevents us from chaotic situation that brings failure in any endeavor. Hence, it is always best to organize our financial elements and put them all in harmony instead of in turmoil.

Assigning
One important technique in managing our finances is the proper allocation of our resources (which may come from our earnings and saving) to our usage or expenditures. A good example of this is the allocation of our emergency fund. Emergency fund should be exclusively used for emergency purposes and not for regular usage.  We can also assign allowances for particular purposes. Examples of these allowances are our household allowance which is allocated for our regular home expenses, educational allowance which is allocated for our educational expenses. The essence of financial assigning is to strengthen our financial condition and flexibility.

Directing
Directing, also called leading, is known as the heart of management. In managing our personal finances, directing involves motivating ourselves to achieve our financial goals. This requires the possession of effective human attributes and attitudes. Any strategic plan will become useless if a person is not motivated. Furthermore, organized and effectively assigned tasks and tools will not work if we don’t have the right interest to execute them. In attaining our financial goals (e.g., financial stability, getting out of debt, high investment returns, etc.,), our principles and attitudes play very important roles. We need to assess our current principles and attitudes which are the roots of what we are, as well as what our financial statuses are.

Controlling
Finally, we need to see to it that our plans are running well, and that any deviations from our original targets are handled well. Thus, monitoring must always be done regularly. We need to monitor and track down the flow of our execution – is it doing well or it is the other way around? Are we meeting our financial budgets or are we not? Do our actual expenditures exceed what we are expecting? These questions must be answered and they must be addressed. With the help of a strategic plan, which is well-organized and properly backed-up with effective tools, plus our will power to achieve our goals, we can assure that we can be able to find solutions whenever financial troubles come.

Again, we must keep in mind that in managing our personal finances, our personal attributes play a very important role. We need to become diligent, patient and wise to execute our procedures to achieve our goals. Planning, organizing, assigning, directing and controlling, these five functions must work together in full force and in powerful harmony.

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“Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags. – Proverbs 23:20-21”

Spending too much on foods and wines can exhaust our money and even our unsold assets. This even becomes worst for people who have already become addicted to meat and alcohols. And to prove it further, these clumsy habits will make us sick and unhealthy, causing our works to weaken and our income to fall. Drunkenness and gluttony also destroy our self-discipline. It strongly influences indolence and procrastination. Consequently, it gives a person failure in every goal he will try to attain – may it be personal, spiritual or financial.

The words of God don’t lie. I personally experience it and can prove it to be true. I have observed that buying and consuming excessive foods, which I cannot resist because of their mouth-watering taste, destroys my financial budget. Moreover, I’ve also proven to myself that avoiding drunkenness and wild partying can give me a lot of cash savings. Therefore, I conclude that gluttony and drunkenness can indeed make a person poor. On the other hand, self-control and fasting can significantly help us save money and increase our work to earn more profit.

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1. Plan ahead
Make a budget of your monthly expenses. Establish your next month’s expenses now. Know and study what you will spend and what you will need to buy next month. Ask yourself – do you have enough current and future resources or income to cover those future expenses? Can you still save money if you will fill up those expenditures? Always remember to have your financial plan the S.M.A.R.T features. That is being specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and trackable. In planning ahead, you should also make a prioritization of your expenses. You will need this to determine what are those which are important are and what are those which can be eliminated. By thinking in advance, you can also anticipate sales with discounts that can give you significant savings. The goal here is simple – knowing in advance the financial troubles and deficiencies you will encounter and having advanced solutions to prevent them. Of course don’t forget that a plan is useless if not followed. Hence you need to have a lot of discipline and determination to achieve your plans and goals.

2. Cut the unnecessary expenses
In order to have the best solution in reducing your monthly expenses, you need to apply the process of elimination. This means you need to eradicate those expenses that are not really important to you and to your well-being. The best examples of these money wasters are the vices that are currently making you poor and unhealthy. These vices include drunkenness, gluttony, smoking, gambling, womanizing and other bad habits that can snatch your money in the pocket, as well as money in the banks. Your entrainment expenses should also be lessened because this is where extravagance starts. You can also try to become more physical and at the same time lower your expenses of paying other people to do the simple works that you can do-it-yourself. Example of this is walking your own dog, washing your own car, and other simple works that may give you time to relax and simultaneously save money.

3. Obey the rules, pay your debts and bills before their due date
The objective here is to avoid expenses that you should not have in the first place. These are penalties, surcharges and interests. Pay your water and electric bills before due date to avoid interests and penalties. Remit your taxes before deadline to avoid interest and surcharges. Settle your debts on time to avoid penalties. Obeying the rules can also prevent future obligations and extra payments. A simple defiance of traffic rules can cause you an additional cash outflow. Hence, it’s best to just live freely and have financial freedom.

4. Stay fit and healthy
This doesn’t need further explanation. We all know that medical bills are everyone’s worst financial nightmares. Moreover, you cannot work and earn money if you are sick. We also know that unhealthy foods are often the expensive foods. Choosing to eat health-friendly food can also lower our expenses and save us more money. Therefore, let us take care of our best physical asset – our body.

5. Action
It’s a one word to add in every steps and every ways for a successful mission. If you want to gain victory in reducing your monthly expenses, you don’t just need to think, plan, read, analyze and promise your self – you need to act on them. This article or any personal finance article, although well and intelligently written, will not become effective and helpful if not put into action.

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1. Avoid vices
Drunkenness, gluttony, womanizing, gambling, and the likes will surely make us poor. These things destroy our financial budget and even ruin our discipline – a virtue that is very important in our way to riches and success. These bad habits are proven to make our pockets run dry. So if you want to avoid poverty, you need to avoid these negative routines and preserve your self-control.

2. Earn right
Financial deficiency comes when people don’t have sufficient earnings that can cover their expenses. Therefore, to avoid such deficiency, you need to earn adequately. One way to assure that you can have good income is to have a stable job. Having a stable job means completing a college degree or post graduate degree. This means that education is very important to overcome poverty. Hence, if your are still in college, be sure that you will study well, graduate with honors, and earn an outstanding educational background that will entice big employers. Another way to earn right is to do business strategically. If you are the type of person who doesn’t rely on employers, you can do business successfully. A successful businessman is one who is diligent, disciplined, intelligent (who does research), intuitive, patient and innovative.

3. Spend wisely
Having a sufficient income will not be enough if we spend extravagantly. Hence, you need to spend wisely and avoid wasteful expenses. One way to control our spending habit is to record and monitor it. We can make budgets to plan our expenditures and check if we spend below or beyond those budgets. We can also analyze our spending pattern to create solutions on how we can manage them. This also means we need to have self-control and other virtues that will stop us from spending wastefully. We can prioritize our basic needs so that we only buy the most vital things and avoid unimportant things. The goal is to not spend beyond our earnings and to not forget our savings.

4. Save with interest
Saving is good but saving with interest and earnings is better. If you hide your money without earning, you will be defeated by inflation. Hence, if you are really serious in saving your money, save it from inflation and put it in investments like time deposits, mutual funds, debt investments and equity investments.

5. Have confidence
This may not sound financially, but if you are really determined to defy poverty, you need to be confident and be positive to reach that objective. Worries and excessive doubts are the top destroyers of any goals. Hence, don’t stop believing and doing every right thing to escape from being poor.

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