Hello, friends! I moved from Maine to Ohio this past week for school so I took a one-week hiatus to get myself packed, unpacked, and settled. The good news is I'm back and I'm so happy to be writing you again! I have a bunch of exciting post ideas circulating in my brain and writing blog posts is definitely more fun than all of the school and application work I have to do, so don't worry - we won't have a shortage of posts any time soon!
I took a poll on instagram recently and almost 70% of you told me you wanted Phase Five to give you a post on Personal Finance this week! I was secretly very excited to get this result because over the past few weeks I have become very interested in educating myself on money management and I am really excited to share with you what I have learned. There is nothing quite more pressing when you move into the fifth phase of life than learning how to handle the new money you're making...or not making. I think it is insane I was never taught the basics of finance in high school or college when it can quite literally be a life-saving skill...but thank god I know how to do an MLA header and geometric proofs, am I right?
Anyways, there are so many different aspects of personal finance that I want to touch on, so I decided to make it into Phase Five's very first series! This post will be fairly short and will just set you up to know what you can expect from this crash-course. I will be diving a deeper into different facets of money management over the next few weeks. To get us started, here are answers to three questions you might have.
1. What is personal finance?
Personal finance is really just a term that describes your financial state as well as what you do to manage it. It encompasses anything you can do with money in a personal context including investing, budgeting, saving, taxes, bills, retirement planning and so much more! Being in a good financial state might seem far away or impossible to you, at least it definitely does to this broke-as-hell college student. That said, we shouldn't give up and let our money manage us and hope everything works out just because it seems impossible to fix and learning about how to manage money well is inaccessible and intimidating. Financial health might seem far away, but I have to believe it truly is attainable, even in our current economic system.
2. What should I expect from this series?
I never learned how to manage money, and as I get older that fact becomes increasingly more dangerous. I also know that I am not the only one with this issue. Lack of education on finance is the reality for so many hardworking people of all different ages who deserve to go to bed at night thinking about something other than money-related stress. That is why I decided a few weeks ago to take matters into my own hands and teach myself about personal finance. I hopped on google and guess what I found: ten thousand different sources who used jargon I didn't understand to explain concepts that were way too complex for a beginner. The vast majority of these sources weren't accessible to the average consumer, yet that is the person who has to focus on personal finance the most. I started to dig deeper and spent hours trying to decipher and digest dense information. As I scrolled in my quarantine pajamas, I was reminded that outside of a stay-at-home order, most people don't have time for that. That is why I have dedicated myself to doing the heavy lifting for you. I will filter what I've learned from my research into these blog posts to make sure the tools you need to fatten your wallet are simple to find and easy to understand.
This series will bring you several posts, some consecutively, and some with breaks in between. Each post will be dedicated to explaining at least the basics of a new topic such as investing, retirement planning, and budgeting. I can't promise to cover every topic related to personal finance, but I want to do my best to include everything you want or need to learn about. In turn, you should expect to read what you ask to hear. That means head down to the comment section below or fill out my contact form and let me know what I should include!
3. Who is this series for?
This series is for anyone who wants to understand how to handle money. It is never to early, or too late, to set yourself on a good financial path.
For people who think it's too early: I am twenty years old and already looking to open a retirement savings account. Most people think that's ridiculous, but I'll have the last laugh when I withdraw a lot more money at 60 than I would have if I started 10 years from now... but more on that in another post! What's more is what I learn about personal finance now will become habit when I'm older. That means less time worrying about how to manage my money and more time enjoying it.
If you think it's too late: let me remind you, no one gets lost time back. You can't go back and change the past or log into your bank account and just type in the numbers you want to see. What you can do is not wait any longer. What you can do is choose to focus on the opportunities you could have in the future, not the ones you think you've lost out on. What is the point of being defeated? Who is that helping? If you truly want something, why would you let something as silly as a number like your age get in the way?
There you have it, the introduction to Phase Five's very first series: Personal Finance! I hope you are as eager to learn about this as I am and that you'll tune into my future posts. Don't forget to let me know what you want to her about regarding personal finance in the comments or through my connect form and subscribe to keep up to date with all of Phase Five's new posts!
Thanks for reading!
See you soon,
Sierra
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