Balancing Your Life
In our quest to accomplish our every goal to the point of reaching our lifetime goal, we would often fail to control our passion and let it become an overwhelming obsession which takes over our lifestyle and even health. At this point, whatever we pursue will not become as important as our life.
In other words, we have to balance our life of achieving goals and the other important aspects in our life such as our health, family, friends and leisure. In spite of everything, all day work and no play make Jack a dull boy or maybe even a sick boy.
Setting goals in these aspects in our life is as equally important as the other goals we have set out to achieve. By spending less time or effort in these aspects, our progress in work might also be affected. It will be an inevitable challenge to balance all of them as we will be too busy for everything but every positive progress in any part of our lives will surely strengthen us to create further improvements in other aspects.
Health
When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth become useless, and intelligence cannot be applied.
-Herophilus
A cliché, repeated in multiple versions of quotes, serves to remind us that without our well-being, one simply cannot be productive in work, enjoy our love with our family and friends. Our health is the most vital aspect we cannot neglect whatever age we are at.
Practicing a healthy lifestyle will improve the quality of our lives and those around us. It will not just increase productivity but also prolong our life. However busy we are, we tend to maintain a nourishing and healthy diet (special occasions are exceptions!), exercise sufficiently and get enough sleep. It would be waste of our efforts to achieve our lifetime goals if we are not healthy enough to enjoy the sweetness of our victories longer.
Family and Friends
Humans are social creatures who cannot live without a single relationship with others. As such, every human is socially dependent on one another to survive right from our birth. It all started with our relationship with our mothers who give birth to us, and then expands to our other family members, and then friends and lovers and so on.
But how important is our social life?
Being socially healthy is as equally important as being mentally and physically healthy. Spending quality time with our family and friends is one of the social needs of an average person of whatever age. After a long day of business or work, don’t just go back to the TV, your phone or whatever electronic gadget. Try to connect with people and pay attention to their lives.
Talk to your family more often. Arrange a date with your loved one. Take the children for a trip. Discuss a topic with your fellow enthusiasts. Have a drink with old friends. Make new friends at the park. Do voluntary work or charity at the old folks’. Send Christmas gifts to the orphans. The idea of a healthy social life benefits ourselves as it keeps us from depression and social isolation which could impact our health at a serious level.
Other than our social needs, being involved in positive relationships caters to our emotional needs. When we surround ourselves with people who do not only understand our needs to love and to be loved, we also gain social support to help us recover from our losses in our lives.Relationships and social networks always work on a give-and-take basis.
Hence, such support is a privilege we receive from giving as much attention and effort to maintain positive relationships with the people around us. As a conclusion, we definitely should surround ourselves with people who understand, encourage and support us in our lives while we also work to share them our strength and inspirations.
Spending Time Alone
Overworked and feeling that you have given all your time to everyone else except yourself are symptoms that you should allocate some personal time to relieve the stress and to reflect on the main aspects of your life. One’s social life is never complete without time for only the self. While most successful people are so passionate that their personal time has become their work time, many spend their leisure with different hobbies.
The amount of time spent by each of us varies but the intentions are similar most of the time, to de- stress and to recover from the strains of their passion in order to perform their best when they return to pursue their goals. By spending some time alone, we will not feel demotivated when we continue to pursue our goals. In fact, this type of self time allows us to be happy and invigorated for further challenges.
This is also an opportunity for us to reward ourselves when we have achieved a goal. Travel the world, take up a new hobby, expand our knowledge in a certain field, or even just playing video games are several ways to revitalize ourselves.
Finance
Money is the root of all evil. Is that what the verse says? Read it again. 1 Timothy 6:10 says “For the love of money is the root of all evil…” Money is amoral and only becomes a bad force when it is in the wrong hands. Many of us finish our high school without ever being aware of the crucial aspect of personal finance in our lives. Only in college or university that we start to realize that the financial control over our lives is key to survival in the society. We then may let society convince us that just getting by is noble. You were created to make more so you can do more. Get connected with a Lionhood Financial Coach that can show you how to MAKE MORE OF YOUR MONEY.
Being aware of the best practices for your finances and actually working them are the factors that decide whether money is good or evil force in your life. After all, it does reflect on our credit scores.
Here are the 10 good habits to maintain healthy personal finance:
1. Tracking Income and Expenses
Undoubtedly, this is the fundamental step of any financial planning and controlling. As the average person, tracking income is not as complicated as tracking expenses especially if the sources of income are not many. Tracking expenses requires some discipline and consistency in our daily habits such as recording the amount of cash we spent, keeping the credit cards bill we paid, keeping receipts of our expenses, loan information, tax records and online purchases.
It gives us a better idea of our personal finance and how it can help us to achieve our goals while reminding us to stay financially healthy by not spending more than our income.
2. Priority Allocations
While it is most basic to suggest that we should plan our budgets, there are definitely certain priorities which we should prioritize our finances for. When we receive our pay cheques at the end of the month, the first step will always be to allocate these funds to the priorities we set in line with our goals.
Such priority funds may be our savings, loans, our children’s education, retirement funds and investments. By setting this as the first step of our budget, we can work out how much we have left to spend or to prepare for other necessities.
3. Storehouse Funds
Other than insurances which can cover certain amount of our losses in accidents, we are advised to keep up to 10% of our monthly income for emergency uses. For instance, having an accident which can keep us away from work means we can utilize these funds which we have already saved up before for our daily expenses. As surprise scenarios can be quite unpredictable, it is best we prepare the umbrella before the rain.
4. Staying Away from High-Interest Credit or Totally Away from Debts
At some point in our lives, it would be almost impossible to stay free of loans. Because of this, we have to consider the loans with the lowest interest rates we can apply for to reduce our repayment. After all, any interest rate imposed upon the principal is the main income of the debtor. Paying way more than what we have borrowed will only increase unnecessary expenses.
Besides, some creditors allow advanced repayments for us to finish the repayment before the planned payment period. In this case, we might even save up on the interest of the remaining payment period. Staying debt-free means gaining more income and also a better credit score which serves to be an indicator of our healthy financial status to creditors. Healthy credit scores allow us to obtain loan more easily in the future as well.
5. Creating a Shopping List & Impulsive Shopping
Buying on impulse means unnecessary spending which will reduce the flexibilities of controlling your expenses as it also means reducing the spending on necessary items. We should not purchase any luxury items when we do not have extra cash and even if we want to, it would usually be the money left in our monthly budget after all our financial priorities are settled.
To control impulsive shopping, it is best we write down a list of items we need to buy so those which are not in the list are considered as unnecessary. Similar to long term and short term goals, we can always save up for luxury items which we can only afford later.
6. Purchasing Value
We would always tend to ensure our purchases give us the value for our money and no after-sales problems at all. In particular circumstances, sometimes it is better to pay a bit more for products that will effectively last longer than buying the cheap ones which we have to constantly replace or repair.
In contrast, not all products are better simply because they are more expensive. The prices of such products are down to a multitude of factors such as competition, consumer perception, quality of materials, cost of methods and etc. We should seek reviews from experts and other consumers before comparing these products to one another and deciding which gives us the best value according to our needs.
7. Investment
Only allocating monthly income for certain investments does not guarantee profit and therefore, every wise investor has plans for timely exits from their investments to avoid losses. In other words, we must possess sufficient knowledge and the right information to invest in any of the various financial instruments. Otherwise, we would suffer losses without being able to understand the reasons.
On the other hand, we must monitor our investment funds to avoid losses as well as to seize fine opportunities to gain more profit from our investments. An even more secure way of preventing losses in our investments would be to have an exit strategy especially when we can foresee the circumstances.
8. Retirement Funds
Even if governments enforce laws for the employees and the working citizens to allocate retirement funds, sometimes, it would not be enough to live comfortably particularly if you wish to retire at an earlier age. Besides, what good does it do for us if we have prepared the funds for our children to graduate from university or college if we end up in poor financial status when we retire?
Having a retirement plan is a long term goal which determines how we would like to live our lives when we retire. On the contrary, struggling to have such financial ability at retirement age means we have to delay retirement work for a few more years.
9. Consistent Raise
Once our income is raised, we should not forget our savings and investments for our future should also be proportionately raised. For instance, the rate of our savings per month is 20% of our monthly income of $5000. That translated to $1000. In the next year onwards, our income is raised to $6000 and so the savings, based on 20% of $6000, should be $1200.
In the case where our expenses are not increased in comparison with our income, extra income means more flexibility of utilising our money. Another way of raising our savings is to increase it from 20% of our income to 25% of our income even when we do not get a pay rise.
10. Analyzing Financial Condition and Improvising the Budget
With all the necessary steps taken to manage our financial status, we often overlooked the review of our financial performance on a particular time basis. The reviews of our financial status usually are carried out at the end of the year or the month. Such timing is usually to see if our plans were executed well enough to help us achieve our financial goals.