In case of imparting personal financial know-how to the young adults, it’s quite unfortunate to see that they aren’t trained well until they become graduates and start off with their professional lives. However, these things do not require dedicated hours of mathematical calculations rather; young adults can acquire sound financial knowledge with a little reading.
Personal financial management tips for young adults
For starters, they can have a look at the below discussed personal financial tips that are crucial to lead a safe and financially prosperous life.
Take charge of your own finances
If you fail to become smart with your own money, then other people will outsmart you as far as managing your finances are concerned. As a result of your ignorance, you may fall victim to the con artists and get robbed of your money with ease. This is because there are many financial planners working with mala fide intentions who are more interested to earn commissions from loans taken by you than to guide you to a safe retired life.
So, rather than relying on outside help, you should learn to take charge of your finances by religiously going through some really best selling personal finance books. Once you are aware of the fundamentals, there is little that any of such professionals can do to catch you off guard.
Find out more about taxes
Whether you’ve got your first paycheck isn’t important than finding out more about the tax laws of the land. Basically, you must be aware of the ways income taxes work and the correct method to calculate them. All these prudent financial moves will help you to decide on a better financial goals as well as obligations and will give you an overview of the amount of money you can save on taxes.
For your help, luckily, there are numerous online financial calculators that will take out the stress and hard work out of the process of evaluating your own payroll taxes. Using these calculators will provide you with your adjusted gross income (AGI), payable tax amount and your net income or after-tax savings.
Start raising a retirement fund
You need to prepare for your golden days from now itself just the way your parents sent you to pre-primary school with the hope of a brighter future for you. By the virtue of early retirement savings, you’ll be able to take ample advantage of the huge compounding interests to build up a mammoth retirement fund. As a result, the need to invest the principle to shore up your retirement fund will lessen, thus enabling you to turn your professional obligations in to a choice rather than a necessity.
There are several employer-sponsored retirement plans that you can opt for based on your financial health and long-term goals. However, these are great retirement savings alternatives since they’ll provide you with the opportunity to save pretax dollars where the contribution limit is high too. Sometimes, these plans allow young adults like you to contribute more than what individual retirement plans allow to their owners.
Have separate emergency fund
One of the most widely quoted personal financial mantra is to ‘pay yourself first’. Regardless, of your student loan debt or piled up credit card bills and a meager salary, it is always wiser to take out some amount out of your monthly income to save as an emergency fund. Having savings as an emergency fund separately will help you ward off any sort of financial woe and keep yourself financially afloat in case of huge urgent medical expenditures. Moreover, over time with diligent contribution to this emergency fund account, you’ll be able to build up a shadow retirement fund or vacation fund or even home down payment money.
For that to happen, you’ll have to consider saving for emergencies as a necessary part of your monthly non-discretional costs. However, you just can’t afford to pile them up on your wardrobe; rather you’ll have to put that money in to high interest cash flow savings or checking account. You can also opt to own a certificate of deposit or money market account as an emergency saving plan. This will help you to reduce the adverse effects of inflation your saving’s present net value.
Apart from the above sensible financial moves, you need to learn the ways to downplay your impulsive urges to buy all things that you don’t need or ones that you can do without at the moment.
Moreover, you’ll have to postpone your acts of gratitude in order to keep your finances and your life out of unnecessary burden. It is best to buy a particular thing only when you’ve saved the necessary amount required to purchase.
Jason Holmes is a professional financial writer. Mostly he is a freelancer, working for various finance communities who are interested about good writing. He is quite knowledgeable of various financial matters like credit card issues, saving money and frugal living; For more details please visit here.