When it comes to owning your own business, budgeting, saving, and planning are much more difficult than if you had a regular 9-5 job. You don’t have a set amount of money you are paid every week or two weeks so if your business doesn’t perform like it normally does, you could end up in a bad place financially. Here are a few tips to establishing better financial principles not only for your business but also for yourself:
Record your expenses
The first step in saving money is to know how much you’re spending. Write down everything you spend over a certain period of time; a month would be sufficient. Even if you get a coffee or a snack, it is important to keep track of everything. Then when the month is over, you will know exactly what you spend so you can begin to save.
Make a budget
Now that you have a good idea of what you spend, you can build a budget to plan your spending, limit over-spending and make sure that you put money away in an emergency savings fund. Remember to include expenses that happen regularly, but not every month.
Plan on saving money
Take into consideration your monthly expenses and earnings, create a savings category within your budget and try to add money to it each month as if it were a regular expense. Look for non-essentials that you can spend less on like eating out or online shopping. Take away from these areas in order to save more for the future.
Set savings goals
Setting savings goals makes it much easier to get started. Begin by deciding how long it will take to reach each goal. Set short and long term goals, this will allow you to reward yourself more often and see progress more frequently. It is natural to want to continue with something when you can see how much you are improving on a regular basis and not every so often.
Remember, when you have your own business, you have to be wise about your spending and be aware that your income one month might vary from the next. You want to have good financial principles in order to be prepared for something that could potentially happen where you need extra funds.
Ronne B
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