3 Steps to Financial Success

1. Create a plan
   Developing financial success can be a difficult road to follow, especially when the goals are long-term and the majority of world encourages short-term living. Keeping a goal in sight and consistently reminding yourself of these benchmarks, is imperative to creating and maintaining financial success. The following three steps are best practices when developing and curating your own long-term financial success.Begin with a budget and write out all of your current expenses and any future expected spending so you can begin to develop a roadmap of your current spending habits. Spend an entire month tracking your expenses so you can define what areas in your life are more expensive than others – and how to cut down on costs and curb your spending. Following this month of detailed tracking, write out a plan for how much you should ideally spend in each area of expense. For example, write out a weekly (which can be calculated into a monthly) budget for groceries and eating out. After you write out your planned spending, try cutting back in a few areas to leave excess money to save and invest.

2. Be reasonable
   After tracking your spending, you may find a few areas in your spending habits that are ridiculously out of control, perhaps it’s your weekend spending or the amount you spend on clothes. Attempting to completely cut back on this spending is smart, but not always sustainable. Anyone can cut their spending back to extremes, but maintaining this change in lifestyle can be difficult to keep up, and will lead to a quicker relapse of previous spending habits. Make sure your budget is reasonable and that your goals are reasonable as well. Walk through a typical month of your spending and ensure you are able to make necessary cut backs and expenditures wisely.

3. Celebrate success
   Working hard to attain a goal is admirable and celebrating this success is pertinent to maintaining a continued lifestyle of financial success. Make sure you set benchmarks and deadlines for your goals, so when these goals are reached, they can also be celebrated. One note, make sure your celebrations are reasonable and keep inline with your financial goals. Blowing a lot of money for the sake of celebrating isn’t always the smartest, most sustainable way of celebrating success. Enjoy the little victories and the major wins, working hard for your goals is not easy and every success needs to be celebrated.

In the end, obtaining financial freedom is not an easy task and there is not a simple, cookie-cutter solution to all issues of financial stability, but ensuring you make a plan, stay reasonable, and celebrate your successes, will help lead you to reach your financial goals.