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Hawthorne is excited to bring you a FREE subscripton to Noom!

Living It!

WITH FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE

Cheers to our second edition of Living it with Financial Independence! If you followed the steps from the past issue, you obtained a free copy of your credit report to assess your debts, you’ve begun tracking your expenses and potentially saved hundreds of dollars on your car insurance. If you missed the past issue, there’s no time like the present to go back to that issue and begin working towards financial independence.

The three areas of focus for this edition include: 1. Debt Payoff 2. Growing your Active Income 3. Emergency Fund

1. Debt Payoff

Remember, all debt is not created equal. In other words, it’s not always a bad thing to have certain types of debt. For example, the communities we manage have debt, also referred to as a mortgage. The mortgage debt is a valuable tool our investors use to buy a property and carry out their business plan (i.e., building, renovating, repositioning, etc.). A mortgage can help you move your family into the home of your dreams and an auto loan can help you secure reliable transportation for work. With that said, most of us are carrying debt in various forms from student loans, credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, etc. If you are carrying credit card debt, you need to evaluate the interest rates you are paying on each card and work to pay off the card with the highest interest rate first. By applying more of your budget towards your highest interest rate, you can pay it off sooner. If you aren’t carrying credit card debt, you can apply the same approach to our loans by focusing extra money on the debt with the highest interest rate. If you’re credit card minimum payments are more than you can handle, you could investigate debt consolidation. www.amone.com is a good place to start.

2. Growing Your Active Income

Active income means you are performing job duties that take up your time and you are getting paid for it with a paycheck. How do you grow your active income? Think career progression and overperforming at work. Hawthorne makes this easy for us with the Career Progression Paths. Team members who progress through their career paths display the initiative, drive, and determination to create value to their communities. If you’re interested, please go to the employee portal homepage in UKG and click on the Career Progression Path icon where you can submit the registration form.

3. Emergency Fund

A good way to prevent unnecessary debt is with an emergency fund. The idea is to put away enough money to cover at least three to six months’ worth of expenses. If your monthly expenses are $3,000 you will need to save between $9,000 - $18,000 to help prevent unnecessary debt. Don’t let these numbers scare you. Break it down into small achievable weekly goals that you can easily achieve or set up a direct deposit from your paycheck every two weeks into a separate and/or different bank account. It’s the set it and forget it opportunity to save. If you don’t see the money, you can’t spend it and you get to ‘keep’ your money.

Have any financial tips or success stories you want to share with the HRP family? Please email them to atimocko@hrpliving.com.