10 hacks to improve your financial health

Are you thinking about how you can improve your financial health? Where should I start? What to look at improving? What to plan?

Below are 10 hacks to help you improve your financial position.

Invest in yourself

The best investment you can make is to invest in yourself. Whatever your current situation is, you can improve it by investing in your education and skills.

You may be employed or not, but developing new skills will help improve your opportunities for a better financial position.

A passion you have can be the ideal area to gain new skills and knowledge. Becoming an expert in something you love will be easy and enjoyable. Or you can develop new skills to help get a promotion or pay increase.

Your new knowledge could be leveraged into a side hustle to earn an extra income stream.

Check out my post on why having multiple streams of income is important, here.

Investing in yourself could be as easy as travelling more and learning from different cultures and people. Travelling is one of the best forms of learning and experiencing new ideas.

Any investment in yourself is the best invest for returns available to everybody.

Spend less than you earn

Simple maybe, but this is a basic principle to improve your financial health. Spending more than you earn keeps most people behind the financial 8 ball.

Making small cuts to your spending can be a perfect way to start on your way to a better financial place. Don’t buy stuff you don’t need.

Follow a budget

It’s hard to improve your financial health if you don’t have a budget

A budget helps you see where your money goes and enables you to plan for the future. Budgets should be flexible and made for your situation. Your budget should be regularly reviewed to manage your money and be aware of where you can improve your spending.

A basic budget is to record your income and expenditures which will show you your cash flow situation

Check out my post on how to budget, here.

Keep reviewing your budget regularly and make it suit your lifestyle, it’s no good trying to follow someone else’s budget as they will have a totally different situation to you, plus their goals won’t be your goals.

Pay out credit cards and personal loans

The next best hack to improve your financial health is to get rid of any credit debt you have.

Credit debt is a huge hurdle to improving your finances, costing you more in the long run for items you should have paid cash for.

The high interest rates of credit debt makes it essential to pay off as fast as you can. Plus the interest rates are much higher than what you can get from saving accounts, making paying off your debt a great investment.

Invest spare cash

Once you have set up your budget and found where you can save money and have some spare cash, invest this spare cash into an investment.

There are multiple places to make investments, stocks, real estate, small business and a whole host of other investments.

Learning about investments is another form of investing in yourself and will help you to improve your financial position.

Set a financial goal

After determining your financial situation, you can set a goal to aim for.

What do you want your financial situation to be? Have enough money for a annual holiday, or a new car or house, maybe retire and enjoy life.

Set your goal high, setting easily gotten goals will only keep you pottering along. By setting your goals high means you will exceed your current situation and be a definite improvement.

You may not reach a high goal but you will reach further than if you set a easy goal.

Set mile stones

When you have your goal, it’s time to set some mile stones for your journey to your goal.

Mile stones maybe smaller goals that you reach on your way to your ultimate goal.

Reaching a mile stone will be a time to celebrate your achievement and keep you on track for your higher goal.

An example of mile stones for say paying off your credit card maybe setting up a budget, determining how much you need to pay monthly to pay off your debt ASAP. Then celebrate when you have paid off your debt. These would be milestones to a goal of better financial health.

Mile stones allow you to measure your progress to improving your finances.

Declutter your life

Get rid of everything that you don’t use, like subscriptions to magazines and/or pay TV. Your reason for these may have changed or they don’t fulfill your needs anymore.

Maybe you have stuff around the place you haven’t used for years, get rid of it and make some money. Have a garage sale or sell it online, it willfree up your space and bring you some extra cash.

You may be in a toxic relationship and by getting out of it you will end up in a better financial place.

Increase your income

Increasing your income will always improve your financial health. You can increase your income by getting a pay rise, promotion, selling stuff online, starting a business or changing your job.

Any increase will be a benefit for you, investing in yourself and learning new skills will help you get a pay rise or promotion or even another job.

Your new skills could launch a new business or allow you to market yourself for to new employers.

Put your finances on remote control

Set up your bank accounts to take care of regular payments, your pay, investments and anything that can be automated over the internet.

By depositing your pay and making all the payments required will allow you to keep track of your finances. You can even automate your monthly and yearly payments so you can set and you won’t have a chance to spend it on stuff you don’t need.