It is a well-known fact that everybody desires to manage their finances to save or achieve optimum financial goals, but something that deserves more attention in financial management is self-management.
Personal financial management is a process of modifying your attitude to money, controlling and curtailing unnecessary Spending and wasting of-of resources. To achieve this, you need to manage ourselves because money does not spend itself, in managing our spending you need to pay attention to the following areas.
Plan before you spend
You need to plan how to spend, what you buy and how you buy.
If you do not plan your spending, you may end up spending more on what you want instead of what you need. Wants are different from needs: while wants have to do with those things we desire to have, needs are those things that serve immediate purposes in our lives. It is important that you make a list of preferences: before we make our purchases, we should itemize our needs according to their order of importance. This will help reduce impulsive spending.
Adopt a maintenance culture
Anything that is not taken care of dies, we need to appreciate everything we have by maintaining them, ranging from personal accessories to automobiles, furniture and office equipment. If we care for things we have, we will derive longer lasting values from them.
For example, I have a car that I like so much, I regularly call the mechanic for regular checks and servicing, by doing this any fault can easily be detected and fixed immediately. If there are no regular checks, a minor fault could develop into major fault before it is detected this applies to every other thing we use.
Exploit market information options
Get knowledge about your area of spending, how prices change, if there are discounts and where you can get the same quality of Goods And Services at the cheaper rates. Find out about discounts, where the things you buy are discounted; most shops would give discounts to customers who buy in bulk or regularly.
High price does not determine the quality of a product or service but where and how you get your product or service determines the price. A product of the same quality may be sold higher at Ebay and cheaper at Amazon.
Adopt the window shopping habit
Window shopping is a process of checking out goods you may need to buy in different locations or shops either to compare prices or quality. It is not a waste of time as some may think but giving yourself the time to make the best choices in your purchases at the best prices. Time spent window shopping is really valuable because it can enable you to save some money, it is less stressful when done online than offline. Just check out that shoe or dress even toys in other shops or websites before you do your real shopping.
It is during your window shopping that you can get market information or trends, price options of goods and services to avoid impulse buying.
We will like to hear your comment if there are other ways you have been able to save on your spending, that can help us update our informtion to our readers in the next article.
