Financial Planning and Analysis’ Best Practices

Financial planning is extremely important, but not often prioritized. It is the process of identifying your life’s priorities and goals and conducting financial analysis to determine how to make those goals a reality.

Financial planning experts have provided best practices that you can follow to ensure that you create the best economic strategy for the future. You need to determine what you have now, what you need to do to improve, and what you will need in the future. This type of financial analysis can help you to grow your assets, enhance what you have, and monitor each year where you are heading.

What You Have Now

Do you know what your net worth is? This type of financial analysis can be a real eye-opener. To do this you must prepare a net-worth statement to summarize all of your assets and liabilities. Assets are items you own (cash, securities investments, home and other property items). Your liabilities are the objects you owe money on, such as your mortgage and credit card balances. To find out your net worth, you take the current market value of your assets minus the current value of your debts (liabilities). The result is your net worth. This provides a basis for financial planning. You know what you should insure, how much debt you have, and you now have a good baseline for future monitoring.

What You Need to Improve

If your financial analysis shows too much debt, then create a budget to see what you are spending your money on each month. By analyzing the inflows and outflows you can reduce unnecessary expenses in order to meet your goals. Financial planning also involves increasing your income. You can earn extra money via a second part-time job, start an online business in the evening, or convert a part of your home into a small apartment for rent

Reduce credit card debt as soon as possible. Interest rates of 24% make it difficult to justify using your card for purchases. Consolidate credit card debt into a low-interest-rate consumer loan or consolidate the debt into your home loan.

What Will You Need In the Future

Most individuals won’t be able to rely just on Social Security in retirement. As a result people are planning their retirement 20, 30 or 40 years in advance by investing a certain amount each month. You may also want to save a portion of your income each month for major purchases or plan for a child’s college education. In addition, having the right amount of insurance coverage is also a critical element to address during financial planning. You don’t want your investments to be unprotected in the event of sickness or a disaster.

This was just a short introduction to financial planning and analysis’ best practices. For further information about your specific goals and needs, take contact with a financial planner. He or she has financial analysis tools that can calculate exactly what you will need to save for retirement and other long-term goals that are important to you.

– Research Optimus