Financial Fitness EASY STEPS TO IMPROVE YOUR FINANCES, NOW AND IN THE FUTURE

BY MADDY PONTZ

Thinking about money can be stressful. It may even be a topic that you’d rather avoid entirely. But with a few easy suggestions from Jerrold E. Beck, a Lancaster-based financial advisor at GWN Securities, Inc. through Kades-Margolis, you can improve your financial wellness—right now and for years to come.

Make a spending plan— and don’t be afraid to be honest with yourself.

“If someone's starting from square one, the first thing is just to have a sense of your spending,” Beck explains. “Not asking you to change your habits, not asking you to do anything radical, except just understand where your money is going.” Beck recommends mint.com or youneedabudget. com to help you, “be more conscious about where you're spending.”

Know when you’d like to retire, and then work backward to plan how you’re going to achieve that goal.

Though it’s never too late to start planning for retirement, when it comes to saving, sooner is better. “If you haven't put in the work and the preparation, you're not going to get the results that you wanted,” Beck says. He suggests planning backwards based on when you want to retire and how much you’ll need in the bank to do so.

Consult a professional.

With such abundant financial information out there, a professional financial advisor can help you design a personalized plan and give you, “confidence in knowing how to move forward,” according to Beck.

Put your savings on auto-pilot.

Beck suggests setting up automatic withdrawals to both your short- and longterm savings accounts. “One of my first recommendations…is to set up automatic savings, where money moves automatically at least once a month from checking to savings, so you don't think about it,” Beck explains. “Even if you put $50 from checking into savings each month, that's $600 in a year. If you do $100 a month, that's $1,200 you have in savings in a year.”

It’s all personal.

When it comes to your finances, don’t play the comparison game, Beck suggests. “Often, what I find is that when I'm talking to somebody, they're saying, ‘Well, my friend owns a shore property, they own a boat, my friend does this and that, and so we must not be doing well because we don't have those things.’ In other words, they're kind of trying to keep up with the Joneses, if you will,” Beck says. “And that is completely the wrong measuring stick to be using. The measuring stick, again, goes back to: What is your goal?”