Pay Yourself First

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Take a paycut and invest in your own financial futureA short post for this cold and wet Saturday afternoon.

To achieve financial independence you need to amass sufficient money/investment/assets to provide “unearned income” to replace your “earned income”.

Most will fail to achieve this in their lifetime simply because they spend first and then investment what is left (typically nothing!).

Those who build wealth know that you need to save first then spend what is less.

By effectively giving yourself a pay cut, say 10% of net income, you set this aside as your money for tomorrow. Only then do you spend what is left.

Whatever you decide to invest this money in, make sure it is taken from your bank account by Direct Debit immediately after payday, thus avoiding the temptation to spend it!!

Good luck 🙂

Personal Finance Management (PFM) Tools in the UK

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I have just been reading an interesting article by Rob over at money-watch.co.uk about Personal Finance Management (PFM) tools available to us in the UK.

Personally I have been using Microsoft Money for over a decade to manage my personal finances, which, together with my personal spreadsheets which have developed over the years, seem to serve me pretty well!

Unfortunately it would appear that the MS Money software has been discontinued in the UK but the version I used is still available from Amazon.

It would however appear that these services are now moving online – which is a natural progression since most of our personal financial activity seems to occur online these days – online banking, managing our ISA/Unit Trust/Sipp portfolios as well as managing our credit cards and various other financial commitments.

Anyway – be sure to check out Rob’s article – the first in a series.

Personal Finance Blogroll – a list of great personal finance sites

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This post is inspired by Rob over at moneywatch.co.uk who has published his personal finance blogroll – a list of hte personal finance sites he reads on a regular basis and I am proud to see that shrewdcookie.com is one of them!

This is a list of the sites I read on a regular basis through their RSS feeds – any time their sites are updated I can read the new posts they have written through a feed-reader. I use the one which comes installed with Internet Explorer 7. Up on the toolbar you will see a little symbol which looks like this: –

Shrewdcookie.com - personal finance RSS feed

This is the RSS reader – it simply shows the text version of latest posts published on a blog – when the symbol is greyed out there is no RSS feed – when it is coloured orange then there is an RSS feed present.

Click on the above symbol to see my RSS feed. If you then click on “subscribe to this feed” you will then be able to view all new posts I publish under the “Favourites” button on your menu bar by choosing the “Feeds” tab.

Anyway, here is a list of the personal finance sites/RSS feeds I read on a regular basis: –

RSS Feed – Get Rich Slowly

RSS Feed – Money Dashboard

RSS Feed – Money Watch (highly recommended)

RSS Feed – Money High Street

RSS Feed – Money Magpie

RSS Feed – Plonkee

RSS Feed – Seth Godin (marketing not money related but a fantastic read)

RSS Feed – The Money Well

RSS Feed – UK Money Pot

RSS Feed – Wise Bread

RSS Feed – Money Hospital

There are many more which will be published in a future article.

If there is a website which I have missed from this list which you feel I should read on a regular basis (!) please add a comment with a link below.

What personal finance topics would you like us to cover?

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We are receiving a steady stream of contacts from people asking various questions, and although we cannot specifically provide “advice” in the regulated sense, we are keen to ensure that our articles are relevant to the topics you are interested in reading about.

Please comment below or contact us via our contact page to outline those areas of personal financial planning you are interested in reading about.

We will then take into account requests and suggestions when planning and writing future articles.

Hope you’re finding the site useful!

Simon