Are you a spender or saver? Do you find it hard to stick to a budget? Do you find it difficult to save towards a goal? For some people, saving money comes easy to them. For others, it’s like pulling teeth.
You might need to adopt a different investment strategy depending on your answers to the above questions.
Success requires some income
Surplus cash flow is oxygen for any financial strategy. Without it, no financial strategy can survive. As
I have said in the past, it is critical that you contribute a certain amount of your income towards building your financial future every fortnight, month and year. It is virtually impossible to build wealth without surplus cash flow. Therefore, if you are spending as much as you earn, you cannot expect to get ahead financially.
Basic steps
Most people are smart enough to realise that wasting money is stupid. The problem however, is that if you don’t know where your money is going how do you know if you’re wasting it or not? And that is the most common mistake that people make – not knowing where their money is going. Worse still, I find that most people consistently underestimate how much they spend. If you’re underestimating how much you spend, then possibly you’re also underestimating how much money you’re wasting. You cannot manage what you do not measure. Therefore, at an absolute minimum you must sit down every six months to understand exactly where your money is going – even if it’s at a high level. In my new book
Investopoly, I have dedicated a full chapter to helping people improve their cash flow management. I provide a screenshot (click to enlarge) of page 34 below which sets out how to review your last three months of expenditure.
If you’re a spender
There are a couple of investment strategies that spenders will find it easier to stick to. The key theme in all of them is to do what Warren Buffett tells us to do which is to “invest first and then spend what’s left over”.
Idea 1: Make additional super contributions
One thing you can do is contact your payroll department and ask them to deduct a certain amount of money from each pay and contribute that into super (as a concessional contribution). This is also a tax effecti
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