Regardless of whether you have a strict budget or just want to be more mindful of your spending, we recommend following our Hierarchy of Financial Needs, which breaks down financial goals into three categories: financial safety, wealth accumulation, and financial freedom. In the video below, one of our MoneyNav financial coaches will go into more detail and go over each step with you.
Hi there, Zach Disette here, one of the MoneyNav coaches. I just wanted to talk a little bit today about tackling some of your financial goals on a budget that could be a really strict budget, or it could just be something that you’re trying to follow a little bit more directly to be a little bit more in tune with where your dollars are going.
We’re gonna put a slide up here. On the page, and this is really a pyramid that I really like to show people and I like to get people to start following. You can see it’s covered over three different kinds of categories, financial, safety, wealth accumulation, and then financial freedom. Like any good pyramid, we have to start at the bottom and then just keep building up from there.
Really everyone is gonna fall into a different phase. Of safety, accumulation, or freedom. But again, we have to start with some sort of emergency savings, right? Maybe you don’t have emergency savings yet, but that definitely has to be one of the first things that we tackle because, without that, all the other bricks in this pyramid are gonna fall if we don’t have the first rung taken care of. So if you’re on a budget and you’re looking at what are some of the first things that I really should be doing, it’s getting to that point of safety. Having some emergency savings built up, probably about three months’ worth, that might come out to be about $4,000 or $5,000 in emergency savings.
In today’s dollars, that’s, you know, pretty adequate for some of those emergencies that we find ourselves in. Beyond that, you know, and kind of in conjunction with that but healthcare health expenses are really some of the day-to-day things that get brought up that we need to have some money saved for by doing that in an HSA, you can get some tax deductions for the money saved, and you can also use that money tax-free if it comes out of your HSA for qualifying medical expenses. Beyond that, we want to start saving for retirement. We wanna start tackling some of the debts that we’ve maybe incurred whether student loans or credit card debt. And then from there, we can move on to some other goals. Maybe it’s saving for a first-time home purchase or a car.
Beyond that, when we kind of get up to the freedom portion, you know, we’re really just trying to max out some of those savings goals to make sure our money is working best for you. So, I just wanted to touch on that a little bit high-level today. Please reach out to me if you have any questions on where you think you’re at because you’ve started along this pyramid, you know, in this journey of your financial planning.
Or if you really just need to start from the very bottom, be glad to dive into kind of your personal finances and tell you what’s the best way to get started and again, if you’re on a budget, that’s not something to be concerned of we just need to have a plan going forward. Please reach out with any questions.
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