Welcome back to an amazing week of action fellas and gals.  So this week I want to share with you something so dear to my heart.  Financials and Budgets.  First off I am not a financial advisor, so please learn from my experience, I do not take liability for anything you do outside of this blog post.  Thought I get that covered.

Now financials and budgets, I wish this is something that is taught in the school programs.  I mean they teach history, if you decide to go into politics than this may be important.  But Financials is an everyday thing.  Why not teach this to people.

First off let me share you a little bit of my background story.  When I was started off in my college years, I opened up my first Credit card, I thought that was cool, spending money I didn't have to get what I want and paying it off later.  Bad mentality there.  Fast forwards many years, I find myself with over $10k in CC bills, plus financing a Vehicle, and bought my first home, and barely anything in my savings to brag about.  Talk about stress, that shit suck big ones, pardon my French.  Everything I made from my profession when into paying my bills.  I knew that it was an area in my life that I am not fond of so I reached out for help.  My good friend shared me a book that I vow saved my life "Total Money Make Over" by Dave Ramsey, I recommend everyone to read it, especially if you don't have your financial pillar in a position that you like it to be.  I'll go over it briefly later in the post.

So I dug myself out of that hole and now I am debt free and its amazing freedom to have.  Key word is Freedom.  Turns out financials is all numbers.  If X + Y = -Z we need to figure out how to make -Z into a +Z.  Easy right.  In business, you want to know where your employees are at and if they are doing the job you have assigned them to do.  Like financials, you want to make sure each dollar has a responsibility.  How do you do that you ask?  This exercise requires deep thought, so find an hour or two in your schedule to run through your numbers.

First off, on a blank sheet of paper, write down your income.  All avenue of income.  Your primary job, how much do you bring in each month? If you are on salary, this is easy, take your weekly pay and multiply it by 4 weeks or 5 weeks.  Depending on the month.  (Now let me add this, your financial planning is something you need to do monthly) If you are hourly, than you want to take an average of what you would bring in.  Adjust it later when your checks arrives.  If you have a second job, great add that in.  If you sell stuff, like a side hustle,   perfect add that too.  Anything that would be consider income.  Now if trading is something you are starting off, I wouldn't add that as income yet.  Really you want to become a consistent profitable "account builder".  When your account is at a size that make sense, than it can become income.  But first Financial 101 will help get you there.

Second, you want to list off all your expense.  I mean all of it.  Rent, mortgage, bills, utilities, car payment, insurance, tithing, groceries, netflix, entertainment, etc.  List it all out.  Remember our goal here is to give every dollar a responsibility.   How will we know what responsibility to give it if we don't know where its going?  Now I know doing this for the first time, you may miss some items, but as you go through your month, some expense pops up, you can add it back down into your expenses.

So here is the fun part.  If you've been trading for sometime, you most likely have read a SEC financial statement correct?  Awesome, right now you are going to create a SEC financial statement for yourself. haha.  Your income and expenses has to equal zero.  

Example:

Income		Expenses
Business	$3000	Rent	$2000
Rental	$1500	Utilities	$750
Yard sale	$895	Restaurant	$400
Birthday Gift	$150	Groceries	$500
		Car Payment	$750
		Insurance	$150
		Credit Card (Min)	$200
		Savings	$1000	Balance
Total	$5545	Total	$5750	-$205

As you can see, are we balanced?  I did that on purpose.  This isn't balance.  From the look of my expenses, it looks like I like to eat out a lot and my car payment is outrageous.  So to balance, we need to ask the tough questions.  Notice how savings is consider an expense.  To me have a cushion is very important.  In the book I recommended earlier, he speaks about a emergency fund.  Emergency are emergency, they come out of no where and if you don't have money in an account, you will feel the pressure.  So savings to me is important, I won't minimize my savings.  But what I can do is eat out less, just so I find time to get rid of my sports car payment and get me something more affordable for my budget.

Now I can also do this, I can find another form of income, maybe uber couple days out of the week, or sell my old stuff that is sitting in storage to increase my income.  This just shows to you that its literally a numbers game.  

Get good at this and I promise you, the feeling of control is now in your hands.  Its all about being the driver of your life.  Don't let anyone else tell you what to do, you are the maker of your world.

I can go on and on, like creating separate account that automatic withdraw to meet your savings goals (i.e annual Vacation trip) or snowballing down a debt so you can be debt free faster.  The beauty is this is all up to you.  Hit me up if you want more details.  I am glad to share all this with you.  Because I know it was beneficial for me.

Oh almost forgot, there an app I love using and it keeps it nice an organize.  You can carry over the budget each month.  And log all your expense into it too.  its call EveryDollar.  Easy to use.  Check it out.