Pers Financial Plan

First Step to Personal Financial Success

Personal financial planning consists of three general activities:

Controlling your day-to-day finances to enable you to do the things that bring you satisfaction and enjoyment.
Choosing and following a course toward long-term financial goals such as buying a house, sending your kids to college, or retiring comfortably.
Building a financial safety net to prevent financial disasters caused by catastrophic illnesses or other personal tragedies.

Second Step in Personal Financial Planning

The first step in personal financial planning is controlling your day-to-day financial affairs to enable you to do the things that bring you satisfaction and enjoyment. This is achieved by planning and following a budget, as discussed in the first article in this series.

The second step in personal financial planning, and the topic of this article, is choosing and following a course toward long-term financial goals. As with anything else in life, without financial goals and specific plans for meeting them, we drift along and leave our future to chance. A wise man once said: "most people don't plan to fail; they just fail to plan." The end result is the same: failure to reach financial independence.

Third Step in Personal Financial Planning

The first two articles in this series discussed the first two steps in personal financial planning: controlling your day-to-day finances to enable you to do the things that bring you satisfaction and enjoyment; and choosing and following a course towards long-term financial goals.

The final article in this series discusses building a financial safety net to prevent financial disasters caused by catastrophic illness or other personal tragedies.