Have you ever felt outside pressure to live a certain lifestyle? As college students, you might feel obligated to go on an extravagant spring break trip, pay for an upcoming wedding, save for honeymoon, create an emergency fund, buy a house, or start investing in your retirement. There is nothing wrong with any of those goals; however, simultaneously planning for multiple goals can be quite overwhelming.

The constant roadblock that ascends from attaining financial goals is the limited resources one must save for them. You might be asking yourself, “how do I go from having little money, with no starting place or building blocks to capitalizing and exploiting all the investment, travel, and retirement opportunities at once in a short period of time”? The answer, although the process might not be, is simple – create a budget. In order to accomplish your financial goals, you must first establish a budget (plan) and work tirelessly to stay on track of your plan.

Most people don’t know where to start. So, here are a few routes a person can take if they are interested in either increasing their income and or decreasing their expenses in a way that allows them to do any of the things I have mentioned above.

1. Create budget.

Budgets act as financial road maps that guide you toward your financial goals. Budgets are customizable. For example, some people prefer setting a weekly budget, whereas others prefer a monthly budget. It is important to allocate every dollar that you earn to a category within your budget. That’s not to say that you must spend all of your money, rather it means that you should account for savings / financial goals within your budget. This will enable you to track where you are in the reaching each goal.   

2. Track expenses.

As previously stated, the budget acts as a spending guide but if you don’t track expenses than a budget is useless. Tracking expenses and cash flow allows you to view how much you truly are spending and how much money you have coming in to ensure that you are in line with your plan.

3. Create goals.

Now that you have a good sense of where you are at, you can start to create goals and allocate your finances according to what your goals are. This is one step that is often overlooked. Without a plan on where to go, a person could fall into a pattern of irrational spending that is not planned and that is not processed as a long-term perspective.

Altogether implementing these into your daily, weekly, and even monthly financial journey will allow you to accomplish things that you may have previously assumed were out of reach. Budgets may help you save money, find ways to make money, and control your money instead of having your money control you. The final step from here is handing it over to God. God is in control.                                         

If you are interested in increasing, your cash flow and the idea is still attractive to you after learning more about how to do it, prioritize researching more to see if this is the best path for you. You may even want to sit down with a financial professional and discuss your options.

Resources:

Personal finance. Personal Finance | FINRA.org. (2023, January 1). Retrieved January 16, 2023, from https://www.finra.org/investors/personal-finance

Cocoves, A. (2022, November 1). How to manage your personal cash flow – nerdwallet. NerdWallet Canada. Retrieved January 16, 2023, from https://www.nerdwallet.com/ca/personal