Mar 11
29
Good order is the foundation of all things. ~Edmund Burke
Have order and routines around your money to create a place for your money to easily grow and be monitored. Wealth does not flow to chaos. Order allows you to more easily carry out the other steps of good wealth management. It helps you put aside money to compound each month. It enables you to easily know how much money you have and where it is. It gives you the ability to monitor and evaluate your investments, and it allows you to easily take over the management of your money at any time. Order and systems simply make all of the other principles easier to implement.
Thoughts and suggestions for creating financial order:
- Find your area of weakness in creating financial order and deal with it.
- Professional organizers are available at reasonable rates to come to your office and design a system to create order.
- Consider hiring a student for 3 or 4 hours a month to file paperwork and do computer work.
- Filing and online paperwork is an excellent job for teen children because it gets the job done while providing them with a great learning opportunity. (Ask your CPA about creating an IRA for your child with the money they earn.)
- Use your time for higher skilled tasks, such as staying current on the financial markets or reviewing cash flow or investment performance.
- If redundant tasks are not getting done, it doesn’t matter as much what the reason is, other than the fact that what needs to get done is not getting done.
- Creative people tend to enjoy the stimulating responsibilities like research and analyzing, and then never get around to the more mundane tasks such as filing.
- Some personalities thrive on creating the order and deter research and analysis.
- Whatever it takes, create a system to maintain order and sustain it.
- We each have our own standards for the minimum that we need in order to feel like we our finances under control.
- You know how much order you need to feel like you have things under control, so work from that standard.
- You may prefer a paperless system with paperless brokerage statements and tax forms.
- Choose your own preferences between paper and paperless.
- Don’t assume paperless statements are less secure than mailed statements.
- You may enjoy getting out a pencil, a highlighter and brainstorming over some of your financial papers, or creating your own spreadsheets from scratch.
- Find the system works best for you and that is the most comfortable to you, because then you will use it.
