Is Financial Illiteracy Ruining Your Life?

The reason money can feel overwhelming is that no one ever taught you how to manage it. It’s rarely taught in families or in schools.   

While it would be nice to take a course that explains exactly how money works, most online and offline courses are far too in-depth for most people.   

Most courses don’t start with the basics but assume you know them already. So, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed because most of the information is over your head. Unless you love finance, you’re likely to lose interest in learning about all the complexities of money management.    

Rather than start with a difficult course in financial management, take the following three steps to begin improving your financial literacy  

What Is Financial Literacy?  

Many people assume that wealthy people have some natural gift for coming up with money-making ideas and creating systems to deliver them to the marketplace. What they don’t realize is that wealthy people have something available to everyone--financial literacy. 

Anyone can acquire financial literacy  — a set of knowledge and skills that will allow you to make informed, intelligent decisions about how to grow and manage your financial resources. 

Learn How to Quickly Resolve Financial Emergencies 

One basic financial literacy skill is learning how to get money when you have a financial emergency.  

What do you do if a situation occurs that you must deal with immediately but don’t have the money to pay for? Suppose a pipe in your house breaks and floods your kitchen. What do you do if you can’t afford to pay a plumber to stop your pipe from flooding your home? 

Although it might appear to be a good idea to get a loan from the bank to cover this expense or to borrow the money from a family member or friend, what do you do if you don’t have good credit and the bank will not lend you money or your family and friends don’t have the money to lend you? 

The smart thing to do would be to get a payday alternative loan. You could borrow as much as $2,500 from a company like Maxlend and receive the money in your bank account quickly. You would not have to offer any collateral but would simply have to provide them with a social security number, a paycheck stub to prove that you’re employed, and a current checking account number. Click here to find out more.

Pay Yourself 10% of All You Earn  

Although paying yourself 10% of all you earn is not a new idea  — and, in fact, it’s centuries-old — it’s still a new concept for many people. The idea behind paying yourself first is that your money will grow in a savings account until it reaches a sum large enough for you to start investing. Successful investments will increase your ability to earn a passive income for the rest of your life. 

Making and Managing Money Is a Learnable Skill

If you’re not earning what you’d like or you’re not able to hold on to the money that you earn, the solution to your dilemma is to increase your financial literacy. Getting good at the money game is not intuitive. It is a skill that you need to learn and practice. Learning about investing, for example, can help you now and for years to come.

When you acquire sufficient financial literacy, you can then focus on other aspects of your life and become a whole person rather than someone who is always chasing money and never catching it. 

There are many ways to increase your financial literacy. You could get a financial advisor, sign up for an online money management course, or buy books and magazines that teach you how to manage your money better.