Valerio Financial

  Have you ever made goals that you were excited to track but lost steam after a few weeks or months?  Well, 2021 is the year to stop with the "good intentions" and create goals that will keep you motivated throughout the year. Of course, there are many areas where you could and should set goals, but we will focus on financial goals for now. What are your 2021 Financial Goals?   Get out of debt? Build an emergency fund? Are you saving for a car, a home, college, or retirement? Or maybe you want to be more intentional with your spending, or create monthly budgets and tracking expenses consistently. Whatever your 2021 financial goals are, let's go through a step-by-step approach to creating goals that will work for you. First and foremost, take some time to reflect on 2020. Stay with me here, I know 2020 was a challenging year for many people, but the idea is to improve and to ensure that you are moving in the right direction, you have to reflect. Think about what work...

So what exactly is a budget?   A budget is merely estimating income and expenses for a given period in time.   Consider it an intentional plan to assign every dollar a responsibility, if you will, where your income minus expenses should equal zero; this is called a zero-based budget.  Before the beginning of each month, take some time to create your budget for the upcoming month.  You may be surprised to discover that you have money that you didn't realize you had.   You may find that you were careless with your spending, which caused you to feel like you were living paycheck to paycheck.   Maybe you didn't realize just how much you were spending in a particular category.  Whatever the case, creating a monthly budget will help you to be intentional about what's important to you.   What's spurring you into action, what is your why?  Are you trying to get out of debt so that you can build wealth and save for retirement, start saving for ki...