At Sherman Wealth, financial wellness is a major core value that we strive to instill in not only our clients, but to everyone surrounding us. Financial wellness is a major player in living a happy and healthy lifestyle physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially.
A good place to start when trying to enhance your financial wellness for yourself and your family is goal-setting and habit-stacking. When you begin setting goals and creating habits, it’s amazing to see how quickly you can improve each part of your life.
Below we are going to discuss five ways to work towards building a life of financial wellness.
Creating an Emergency Fund
First and foremost, we want to discuss the importance of establishing an emergency fund. It’s an incredible feeling to have money in the bank. In good and bad times, it makes you feel secure knowing that if things get worse you are covered. This is especially true when you have a home and a family to take care of.
To help your family feel some true financial wellness, sit down with your partner to discuss what amount of money you feel comfortable to set aside in case of an emergency. Determining how much to have in your emergency savings is completely personal and will be different for every single individual and family. For some, six months of expenses in cash sounds too conservative while others may prefer a year of expenses or more. Find what works for you and stick with it. Either way, having cash in the bank for emergencies is a smart move.
Designing a Family Budget
Tracking your spending is a huge part of building financial wellness, especially as your family begins to grow. As your life continues to get more complicated, often times, your spending begins to grow as well. A good tip to staying on track is to establish a healthy budget that makes sense for you and set time each month to consider the following:
- Review our spending and budget from previous month
- Plan out our budget for the upcoming month
- Review our financial goals and track our progress on those goals
Additionally, this set-aside time allows you to discuss upcoming events and create a schedule for the month. Not only will you be budgeting your money, but you also will be budgeting your time. After all, they are both finite resources.
Technology is another tool to consider when becoming financial literate and well. Automating your finances allows you to aggregate and see all your data in one place at the ease of your smartphone. Automation will not only help you stay organized, but save you lots of time in the process.
Investing Automatically
A lot of the time we find that individuals are hesitant to invest. One of the main reasons is that they are waiting to make more money. This can be a slippery slope because as we make more, there can be a tendency to spend more as well.
This is where automating your investments comes in. This is the process of deciding how much you can allocate each month toward investing and automating it. If that’s $50 per month to start, great! And if it’s more, even better. If investing becomes an automatic habit, over time, it won’t even seem like a task anymore. As you grow, your incomes will grow, and so will your investment accounts. This financial wellness habit can get you on path to financial success.
Giving with the Family
Giving back to the community is something near and dear to our hearts. It feels great to be able to give to family, friends, neighbors, and charities. When establishing your weekly, monthly, and yearly budget, if interested, think about allocating a percentage of your extra cash to your favorite charities. This is a great way to involve your children in giving back and learning about the community. From this act, you are teaching your children at a young age that giving is a part of financial wellness. When you’re giving, you’re putting goodness back out into the world.
Treat Yourself
Treating yourself to the things you love is a very important part of financial wellness. If you have a passion for traveling or dining, you may be wondering how to squeeze a family vacation or some dinner outings into your yearly budget. When creating your budget, make sure to leave room for activities and adventures that make you and your family happy, and cut out elsewhere, including some of those unnecessary costs or subscriptions. It’s important to be able to find the right balance between saving for the future and enjoying it in the present.
Ready to prioritize financial wellness in your life? You can get started with our financial planning software and a complimentary introductory meeting to get a holistic view of your situation. For questions or concerns, email us at info@shermanwealth.com.