7 Tips to Achieve Financial Security
April 24, 2021 - How-To Articles, Money Bits
Anxiety.
Financial, health, social, and even spiritual anxiety are a core part of many peoples’ lives.
If there is one that undercuts pretty much all, it has to be financial anxiety. How much will I make this year? What does the future in my job portend? Will I be able to support my family?
PT Barnum famously gave the following quote about money, “Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.”
Getting to a point where you can think of yourself as financially secure is about getting a hold of your finances. Many people are in a spin cycle of debt and anxiety because they make little effort to bring things under control. If you allow money to control you, you might be in for a miserable existence.
Instead, you have to be proactive and decisive moving forward. These are some tips to achieve financial security.
- Put a Practical Budget in Place
A budget may seem basic and cliché. However, if you don’t know how much you make and where it goes, that is the first red flag as to why your finances are a hassle.
Budgeting allows you to obviously know how much you are spending. More importantly, a person gets a sense of their priorities. It is these priorities that you have to stick to because a budget is useless if you can’t abide by it, or the nearest approximation.
Priorities allow a person to have an understanding of their essential and discretionary expenses. Discretionary expenses like subscriptions and services allow some wiggle room to divert some of that money into savings on the side. If you can’t afford to save, a budget prevents sinking further into debt.
- Having an Emergency Fund
Emergency expenses can come like an unexpected punch in the gut. You could budget well for a few months only for an emergency healthcare expense, for instance, to derail you overnight.
An emergency fund allows you to stick to the budget better. This fund can also come in handy when you need to transition between jobs or make a single large purchase.
- Placing a Lid on Your Debt
Sinking into debt is stealing from your future. If you are going to saddle up debt, it better be worth it. Credit cards and student loans literally have tens of millions of Americans in a spin cycle. Many end up digging their holes further in attempts to manage existing debt.
Work towards eliminating your debt if you mean to have a secure future. Consider debt consolidation if the debt is spread out. This will allow you to have a single focus, possibly lower interest rate and easier management.
Have a target on clearing your debt, or at least reducing it to a manageable level. If it means painful expenditure cuts or selling costly assets, by all means get a lid on the situation. The principle of delayed gratification comes to mind in such a situation. Don’t take extra loans, unless absolutely necessary.
If you get to your retirement years with serious debt, then you are in for the opposite of golden years. Eliminate debt in order to retire earlier and more comfortably.
- Create Extra Income Streams
Saving your way toward a financially secure existence on an ordinary job is difficult. However, increasing your earning streams gives you greater flexibility.
This way, you can work on your day job, while stipends from other coffers flow into your pockets. The only way to achieve this is by measured investment. Diversifying your revenue sources to include ventures like Bitcoin mining can be one way of doing this.
This radiation can make your existence smoother. Just like an emergency fund helps to make budgeting easier, increasing your revenue sources allows you to save and build wealth.
- Diversify Your Portfolio
The old adage goes, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
Investing is a process of constant recalibration to ensure you are not overtaken by events. Diversification is a time-tested technique of preventing such hurricanes from neutralizing your holdings.
Look at different assets. If you have all your faith in equity markets, remember the 2008 financial crash.
Bitcoin can be one way of branching out and broadening bases. This asset has unique price movements and it can be a way to diversify your holdings. Once you mine Bitcoin, some of the coins you hold may be insurance against significant slides in stocks or commodity prices.
- Have a Retirement Plan in Place
Pretty much all of the financial planning is geared towards having a stable retirement. People in the developed world are working longer than ever because most can’t afford to retire early, or even at the traditional 60-year mark.
It is never too early to start planning for your retirement. Even if you are only a few years into your career, it never hurts to have such contingencies in place. If you work at a place that offers a 401(k), take up that opportunity and start planning for the future.
Other retirement account options are available to those who don’t have a 401k. Do research on the saving arrangements and tax implications of the different retirement account options available.
In summary, having your retirement planned out is the essence of financial security. You cannot afford to leave it late or opt to depend on others during your retirement years.
- Create Goals to Measure Progress
Every so often, you come across the term ‘life goals.’ This is a casual way to praise someone’s status and express your aspiration to get there.
It is time you made personal financial goals. Goals help you have a clear plan and accountability tool against complacency.
Whether you want to be debt-free by 30, own a house by 35, have $400,000 in savings in a fifteen-year period, make realistic and achievable goals to track progress.
As it is often, you may not achieve these goals in the timeframe you set out to. However, it is like aiming for the sun and landing on the moon. Even when you don’t actualize the goal, you will have covered most of the way there.
The feeling of accomplishment when you achieve a financial goal is incomparable. You can build up on the progress and aim even higher.
Ultimately, the aim of these tips is to have as high a ceiling and fallback mechanisms to cushion your finances. Being financially secure is not just about you but also about the future generations of your family that get to start off in relative comfort.
Bitcoin Mining as One Option of Supplementing Your Finances
Mining Bitcoin is one of the many ways that can help boost your financial bottomline. It is a unique opportunity for the proactive, who want to take control of their finances by the bullhorns.
If you are interested in mining, Advanced Mining is an equipment reseller that can help you procure state-of-the-art Bitcoin mining gear from Bitmain. Besides, we provide hosting services that make the equipment less costly to maintain and much more optimized for sustainable mining.