Important Personal Finance Tips for Millennial's

Important Personal Finance Tips for Millennial's

As younger adults, millennial's often fall into the mindset that plagued older generations in early adulthood. It is common for young adults to live frivolously with the general mentality that there is plenty of time later in life for saving and investing. This mentality can unfortunately prevent you from achieving financial security earlier in life. In addition, it can even lead to the development of bad money management habits that ultimately impact you for the next several decades or longer. These important finance tips are essential for millennial's who are eager to improve money management.

Prepare an Accurate Budget: A personal budget is the quintessential financial management tool. You may be aware that a budget shows all income sources and all expenses for a specific time period, and this time period is usually a month. However, many people create a budget and do not look at it again for months.

To be truly effective, you must use your budget regularly to track spending, to make financial decisions and more. Your budget should regularly be compared against actually spending and income so that you always know where you are financially. You cannot realistically know if you can afford to buy that new shirt online or enjoy a meal out at a restaurant with friends if you do not use some type of accurate budgeting strategy.

Create Thoughtful Financial Goals: Everyone has financial goals, but many young adults have not formalized long-term or shortterm goals. They simply think that someday they would like to take an amazing vacation overseas and buy a house or a condo. The reality is that very few people will achieve major goals related to finances without planning and making regular progress to achieve those goals. Write down all short-term and long-term goals. Research an accurate amount of money needed to achieve those goals. In addition, assign a timeline to those goals. This will help you to determine how much money you need to save on a regular basis to achieve your goal within the specified timeline.

Save Regularly: There are multiple reasons why you should save money regularly. First, every adult regardless of age should have an emergency savings account. This account should have at least the equivalent of your expenses for three months. This should be a starting goal, and over time, you may wish to increase the balance in your account to the equivalent of six or even 12 months of expenses.

You also need to save regularly to achieve the financial goals that you have established. A portion of your funds should also be saved for retirement. It may seem too soon to worry about retirement, but millennial's who start saving for retirement sooner can more easily achieve their goals. More than that, they may even be able to retire many years sooner. Your budget should be updated to reflect savings for all of these goals.

Properly managing your money is not difficult to do. You simply need to develop smart habits and pay regular attention to your budget and financial goals. These tips will get you well on your way to improving your money management efforts.

Mark Angelo is a Co-Founder of Yorkville Advisors.