Trying to manage your money can be a lot like trying to lose weight. You know what you need to do to be successful; it’s the doing part that gets a little sticky.
Well, there’s no time like the present to get your financial house in order: It’s Money Smart Week, the annual event sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago designed to help you take control of your financial future.
The Fed, along with more than 200 other organizations, is offering roughly 450 free classes, seminars and activities to help you brush up on money management skills or to develop new ones. There are classes for people at all phases of life, from “Money Management for Teens” to “Financially Savvy Seniors,” and the topics range from home ownership to investing to improving your credit.
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Classes run through Saturday all over the Chicago area. There also are some online, so you have no excuse for not taking advantage of a free opportunity to fix your finances.
“A lot of people don’t know where to go if they have questions or are in a little bit of financial trouble. This is a united effort to get the word out,” said Alejo Torres, senior outreach manager for the Chicago Fed. “[Consumers] can feel comfortable that they are not going to be sold products and services, and that it is strictly educational.”
Go to moneysmartweek.org/chicago to get started.
Tackling your finances might seem like a tall task, but start with baby steps. First ask yourself: How do I spend my money?
“It seems ridiculously simple, but most people don’t realize what they spend their money on,” said Ilyce Glink, a personal finance guru and author of “50 Simple Steps You Can Take to Improve Your Personal Finances.”
Glink recommends starting a journal in which you list everything you buy. That will allow you to compare the amount of money you make with what you spend.
“Once you start thinking about what you spend your money on, how your money flows out, you have to start looking at the money flowing in and if those numbers have any relation to each other,” Glink said. “We’ve all gotten used to spending way more than we actually have, and Money Smart Week is a time to get things back in line.”
That means creating a budget. Or as Cate Williams likes to call it, your own little financial GPS.
“Budget conjures up having to buy shoes at the Goodwill. All a budget is, is looking forward and forecasting how you’re going to spend,” said Williams, vice president of financial literacy for Money Management International. “There is room for fun stuff in the budget. It just might not always be as much as we like.”
Once you figure out how you’re spending your money, you need to look for ways to spend less of it. It’s what Glink calls “trending down.” If you buy your lunch everyday, switch to every other day. If you buy two cups of coffee every day, buy one instead.
“There are little things you can do that can have a huge payoff,” Glink said.
With your budget and cost-savings plan in place, you can start to think about the other building blocks of your financial foundation, such as paying down debt, managing credit, investing and saving for retirement — all that stuff that Money Smart Week courses cover.
But remember, the road to financial fitness is not a race.
“It’s about getting there a dollar at a time,” Williams said. “It’s not about being Warren Buffett in six weeks.”
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