It’s never easy to find out how to manage your personal finances. Most of us have not received formal money education, and even majoring in something like business or finance doesn’t help a lot when it comes to personal finance. Usually, if we learn anything, it comes from our parents — and this might not be good.
How Managing your Personal Finance also Helps you Survive during Difficult Times
We can try to Google our way to a financial education if nothing else works for us. But that’s a bit like trying to drink water from a fire hose. There’s a great deal of information out there (and a large amount of it is not good data or even real, this being the internet).
Now, add something like, well, I don’t know, a global pandemic into the mix, and instantly figuring out how to handle your personal finances might seem incredibly difficult.
Yet, even in difficult times, there’s good news. But before going there, let’s first learn what Personal Finance is.
The Basics: What is Personal Finance?
Personal Finance is the financial management of an individual that covers managing one’s cash inflow and outflow, asset growth over time taking into account various financial risks and future life events. In short, Personal Finance is managing, growing, and preserving your money.
Understanding personal finance topics offer people a better chance of success in facing the financial challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities of life.
Here is the good news! There are things you can do to manage your personal finance:
- Learning how to handle your personal finances — and then controlling them — is possible.
- This is not a matter of doing something crazy fancy or complicated. It’s about knowing the basics, and then mastering them.
- There is one online tool that can get your personal finance management done easier and faster — and we’re sharing that along the way.
Why Personal Finance Management Should be Your First Focus
You have a good resource online if you want to understand what you need to do right now to better manage your money, particularly in what can feel like dark and uncertain times. But how can one maintain or sustain personal finance during the present times of pandemic? We have asked Vernon Joseph Go, a Digital Content Creator and “A Lazy Investor’s Way” book author to give us a starting point for our research.
“For a simple approach, one can look at one’s cash inflow and/or outflow,” Go said. “If you lack inflow, then focus on that. If your outflow is out of control then focus on disciplining and/or controlling one’s spending while focusing only on essentials. Whatever is in excess, can be saved for future emergency funds or invested.”
During a pandemic, we lack control over the overall state of public health. However, we can monitor whether or not we are following the guidelines that have been placed to keep ourselves and others safe.
We can not monitor the reaction of the general market to current events and crises. However, we can monitor whether we are adhering to our investment strategy or not, and continue to execute the plan to get us to our goals.
We can not control what the economy, as a whole, is doing and how this could impact our individual jobs. Nonetheless, we can monitor whether or not we planned for an emergency before this global crisis happens.
Focus on what to manage is the one big secret to personal finance. When you can master this, you’ll be able to master every situation in which you find yourself. Understand what comes within your power to control, act upon, and do something about it before you do something more.
Reach your Financial Goals using Personal Finance Tools
Some of the best ways to achieve your financial goals and manage your money are through the use of different personal finance tools or budgeting applications. Thanks to the digital era in which we live, we have access to innovative tools that make saving money, spending, planning financially or budgeting so much easier.
Yet, there are heaps of personal finance products to choose from and apps out there. The question is: How do you learn the proper ones?
Pigly, a Financial Services website, offers free interactive tools to teach people about personal finance. They offer a diverse collection of calculators and planners that are free to use, which is very relevant during the global crisis like the Coronavirus pandemic as many people are going through tough personal finance situations.
They have a huge comprehensive listing of calculators from Budget Calculators to Business Calculators. The calculators are organized within each category by major category and subcategory. Pigly still has about 50 more calculators scheduled for release, although they thought it would make sense to start the size as it is and update it incrementally so that they can collect feedback from users and improve the process as they go.
Pigly is a reliable source for all personal finance-related matters. The calculators make the work in solving personal finance fun and simple to run, helping the users make smart decisions. They offer a number of useful resources like savings, mortgage, credit cards, cars, investing, debt, budgeting, and business.
Experts review their online calculators to ensure accuracy and reliability, with regular updates adding new features based on feedback from the users. Usage is free, without registration being required. They have an in-house team of experienced senior writers who will study and edit these backend codes for the tools they provide.
Let Pigly help you with your Personal Finance management! Their free calculators can be used for figuring out loan payments, estimating investment returns, or just about any other important financial decision.
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Conclusion
What we are facing today is shocking. It is terrifying. Yet, basic laws of personal finance have not changed during this time of global crisis or at any time. We can use those to guide us forward and add to some specific guidelines that are useful.
We all have resource limits. We each have infinite quantities, be it time, energy, or money. By concentrating on what we can control, and by using the available financial solutions that are free to use to refrain from spending on tools, we ensure these valuable resources are focused on the most efficient, successful, and optimistic ways on how to manage your personal finances to help you survive during difficult and tough times.
With this in mind, the guidelines about how to handle your personal finance — during a crisis or at another period — should be done proactively to support yourself and move toward your objectives.
