Personal Finance Self-care Questions to Ask Yourself

Whether you are in your prime years or are just about to start your career, focusing on personal finance and having self-care procedures of some sort should keep your finances healthy. In this article, we listed down questions that you can constantly ask yourself to assess your plans, goals, and actions.

Addressing questions related to personal finance will get your plans in order and allow certain high-value items to be attended to immediately. By high-value items, we mean your debts that arise at the expense of your savings.

Do I have a written budget?

When you have a budget plan you are putting yourself up for a successful journey towards achieving financial success. Thus, giving you a firm grasp of your finances and a sense of direction. It can be messy to tackle finances if there is no budget in place because money, in a glimpse, can go missing and can be spent unwisely at any time. Establish a budget plan or expense plan as soon as you can before you lose wealth which will make it difficult to reach goals or recover.

Do I have my financial goals written somewhere?

Goals help in accomplishing the personal visions you set beforehand. As you set your goals, make sure that you break down items into doable actions. This way, your goals do not just sit on a piece of paper waiting for themselves to be achieved through miracles. To give you an idea, here is how you can do it:

Goal #1: To maintain 10,000 Pesos as the remaining balance on my debit card.

✔️ Set a weekly budget for expenses like groceries, leisure, takeout food, etc.

✔️ Increase the maintenance balance in increments of 1,000 until 100,000 is reached.

You may set 2 to 3 sub-goals if they are directly related to the main goal. If the sub-goal does not directly affect the main goal, then it does not belong to the item. Finally, every goal should have a timeline. It can be as simple as the number of weeks, months, or years. While you may or may not strictly follow the timeline, it should still provide you with a sense of time.

Am I making progress when it comes to reaching my goals?

How do you know that you are making progress? That is if you see ticks on your goals checklist. Again, this is the importance of having a checklist of your personal finance goals, it gives importance and highlights the items that are pushed back or neglected. Say you are successful in accomplishing goals related to saving up but when it comes to tracking your expenses you see that there are fewer boxes ticked on the checklist. With this, you have visuals of what needs to be done, improved, or changed.

Do I put money in my emergency fund?

One of the best personal finance self-care advices you can get is a reminder to put money into your emergency savings. Nobody, and not even forecasts, can tell when a natural disturbance may occur. As unfortunate as it may sound, accidents, whether caused by nature or not, can heavily affect your finances. Having an emergency fund set up and ready to be used at your disposal renders a minimized effect on your finances.

Do I have health insurance?

As the golden saying goes, “health is wealth”, not only should you protect your wealth, but also your entire well-being. How are you to enjoy life and the company of the people you cherish if you are slowly deteriorating? Get health insurance for you and your family today and live tomorrow with peace of mind.

Do I have investments? If so, are my investments doing well?

Self-care also means you are constantly learning how you can improve your finances. The more frequently you reinvent yourself, the faster you achieve your goals. Investing helps you protect your wealth and generate passive income. Meanwhile, you must check your investments with your Investment Specialist every now and then to be updated with the status of your earnings if you are already invested.

Do I have an estimate of the amount I would like to see in my retirement savings?

To do this, envision yourself once you have retired from work. Do you see yourself traveling more? Do you have plans on migrating? If yes, where to? Simple questions regarding the littlest plans that you have for when you retire should help you in deciding an amount to save up for retirement.

Retirement savings can be saved up for as early as you start your first job. While others still have the opportunity to save up for retirement in their 40s, the sooner you start the more you are able to put in your savings in preparation for your old age.

Am I able to adapt to the present circumstances?

Adaptability is resilience to any distasteful external or internal events that directly affect your personal finances. It may sound like your budget or financial plans are lenient when you are able to adapt to change and accept whatever is served but leniency, when managed well, presents itself as an ideal skill helpful in recovering losses.

So the question is, what are you going to do next?

Among all the personal finance self-care questions, which are you able to do, about to do, and neglect to do? As you tackle every item in the list of questions above, make sure that you are paying attention to your capability to reach whatever it is you have established to be achieved. The last thing you want is to overestimate your skills which may lead to financial distress. So, indeed, a question you really need to ponder is, what are your next steps?