You need to get yourself a rock solid bowling bowl at home…

A good aim to strive for in most households is to be financially stable.

What do I mean by being financially stable? I’ll provide you a neat and tidy list, numbered for your reading pleasure:

Financial Stability is:

1)      Managing your cashflow monthly
Understand everything that is coming in but most importantly what is going out. It’s not only about how much but also it’s important to understand what you spend your money on too. You should be living below your means

2)      Review your Balance Sheet monthly
Know your net worth, that being everything you own (assets) less everything you owe (liabilities)

3)      Manage all bad debts down to zero
This includes getting all your credit cards, personal loans, students loans etc down to zero

4)      Have an emergency fund
This amount should be at least 3-6 months of your total monthly expenses

5)      Insurance  
Have the right level of insurance coverage– think emergencies

6)      Start saving for investments (& retirement)
Pick your investments so you can aim to grow your money

7)      Do some real mindset work to figure out any blocks you might have
If your personal, internal money talk is not helping you, you may need to ask yourself or even perhaps work with a coach to understand how & why behave with money the way you do? What is your money narrative? Are you working very hard to keep up with the Instagram Jones’ and have you acknowledged it’s costing you? Are you actively avoiding thinking, talking about money hoping it will fix itself? Do you understand you will need to deal with this?

That’s quite a list, but I’d like to change the view of it for a moment to this:-

A rock solid Bowling Ball

Manage your cashflow monthly

Review your Balance Sheet monthly

Pins

Manage Bad Debt

Have an emergency fund

 Have Insurances in place

 Save to Invest

 See to your money mindset and it’s patterns

This is what I have come to understand. Anyone is who is good with money, spends time on it.
They look at it at least monthly and sometimes they make actionable decisions or sometimes they do nothing but ‘just’ look at it.

What are they looking at? The answer is, their cashflow and their detailed balance sheet.
Being in charge of and in the know of, both these things is like having rock solid bowling ball that can be used to aim at the pins/goals/dreams you want to knock down and accomplish.

By looking at your cashflow and what you are spending your money on, you can check to see how much things are really costing you. You can start making decisions to cut costs if there is a need, especially if you’d like to knock over a pin like Debt or perhaps there could be a need to negotiate an increase to your income, if you want to increase your emergency fund pin.

By looking at your balance sheet, you put a stake in the ground for where you stand on building up your assets and lowering/managing your debts. By listing out where you have your money, what you owe and what it’s costing you in detail you will have facts and knowledge, and this will make decision-making on what to do, a lot clearer.

Cashflow and a Balance Sheet are weighting tools and if you don’t like my bowling reference, call them what you like - your bat, your racket, your hockey stick, your club – they are just tools that help you make conscious decisions about your money and help you become financially stable, which will lead to you getting financially secure and on to being wealthy.

And I don’t even mean wealthy like a red dragon sitting on a pile of gold ducats, I mean wealthy like the joy of having the freedom to choose! To choose the job you do, the passion projects you can follow, the choice to give your time or even generous funds to the causes you support or, just to have the breathing space and time to decide on, well, anything. Who wouldn’t want freedom like that?

P.S I am aware that some people are lucky enough to have some of their pins knocked down by their parent’s bowling balls or even sometimes by a financially savvy partner’s bowling balls. But we should all aim to have our own bowling ball as there is freedom and wellbeing to be had, when we can decide on what to do with our own money