by Angela Ozar | Featured Contributor
Counting your money is a lot more fun than counting your calories. If you focus this year on your personal finances, you may find that your money is hanging around longer than that juice cleanse. Here are a few ways you can buff up your bank account.
1. Ditch the personal trainer and get a financial planner
A financial planner is to your wealth, what a personal trainer is to your health. They are the expert in the financial arena, so you don’t have to be. A financial planner will help you set your goals and create a plan to meet them. The best part is that they’ll do most of the heavy lifting, and you’ll get the long-term results. The only crunches you’ll be doing are numbers.
2. Track your spending instead of your snacking
One way to do this is through mint.com. It’s a free tool that tracks activity from your bank account and then categorizes your monthly expenses. You can see exactly where your money is going, and it won’t be to your hips. Mint automatically sets up a standard monthly budget for you, but you can go in and customize it to fit your needs. You can also export the data into an excel spreadsheet to track your spending history and share with your financial planner. Now when your friend comments that she went over her calories intake for the day, you can reply with how much money you saved.
3. Pay yourself before you pay your gym membership
Always pay yourself first. You may be wondering if you read that right, but you did. As an entrepreneur, you’re used to paying yourself last- if at all. When you do pay yourself, pay your future-self first. You can’t run your business forever, just like you can’t run on a treadmill forever. Prepare for that day today by investing in an Individual Retirement Account (IRA). If you condition yourself to make monthly contributions to your IRA, you’ll be in good shape by retirement.
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Inspired by her career move from a corporate analyst to working for a startup accelerator, Angela Ozar writes about how paying off her student loan debt and saving early for retirement changed her life.
She provides a fresh, entertaining, and practical approach to personal finance for young professional women in her blog The Girl Millionaire. Her blog makes finance fun.
Angela is also helping to grow female startups in the Cincinnati/NKY area as Program Manager of Bad Girl Ventures, Inc., an accelerator that aids in scaling women owned businesses through education, mentoring, and financing in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio.
She is a big fan of nature, an expert wreath maker, and would rather eat brussel sprouts than cake.
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