Personal Financial Planning

What is financial management?

What comes to your mind when you hear the term, financial management?

The school definition of financial management is generally the efficient and appropriation of funds to achieve a certain goal or plan.

What is personal financial planning?

This generally means understanding your current financial situations and employing to the best of your ability the current assets you have to plan for your daily life as well as the future

How much do you know about financial management and when did you start to take a serious look at your financial management goals? When do you start to plan your finances? When were you taught to look into your finances?

Lesson learnt: When I realized I needed to make a change

When I was in college I remember all I did was watch movies, go to class, call mom when my funds ran out and the cycle continued until I cleared college. During that time, I got unpaid internships with the hopes that I will get a job with the same company that I was working for. Oh, boy was I wrong. After three months of giving it my all, I received the bad news that the company would not consider me for a permanent position.

Dejected, I went home after a very warm sent off by my colleagues at the office. I remember then looking at my account and I despaired. During that time I had managed to accumulate only 9000 shillings for three months and here I was going back to sit down and start again afresh.

Then it hit me hard, I had failed the most basic life principle, planning for the future. That is when it hit me that I wasted four years in college thinking that class was all I needed, I failed to realize I needed to find a part time job, academic writing for instance, or selling fruits, generally anything to help me prepare myself for the real world of responsibilities.

What Agnes Mukulu is all about

In this blog, we shall look at ways in which to do personal financial planning form the ways below just to mention a few:

• ·          Savings
• ·         How to manage your debt and bills
• ·         Insurance
• ·         Investments
• ·       Setting standards of living

With every step of the way, we shall be looking into the general guideline of making all the above and customizing them to fit your needs and current situations. Personal financial planning is not one swing fit all kind of thing; it needs one to take the time to identify what they need to change and what they need to maintain.

It is never too late or too early to start taking the steps towards financial freedom and success. If you can big when you are 20 well and good it means that you can retire by 30 or 35 and still live off your success without the hustle of alarms and employers. If you are already in your 30s and above, it means more dedication and radical but not too radical changes to get there.

What I know is that is never too late to start.