Today I’d like to talk about setting up some financial habits. If you are thinking about buying a house refinancing, buying a car, preparing to finance your kids through college, you need to set up some financial habits so that you can create those goals that become reality.

The very first thing you need to do, in my opinion, is Live Within Your Means. Living within your means is, looking at what it is that you want to purchase, For an example, a car. Do you really need a new car every year? I know some people who think they do. I don’t. But as long as my car works and works well and I’m not dumping money into it because it’s constantly breaking down, I don’t buy a new car every year because it’s not within my financial goals to my financial means. So, there are some other things you can think about. You need to make sure if you buy a house it’s within your financial means to pay for that house and to keep your credit cards under control. Do you really need your credit to go on vacation, maybe you should save money in order to go on vacation. But definitely live within your means.

The second and most important in my opinion is that you Pay Yourself, pay yourself first. When you get your check from work, take a little bit out of that money and put it in a seperate account and have it there just in case of an emergency. That has been one of my habits since I started earning income and it has made a huge difference in my life. The other thing about doing that is it should go up, the amount of money you put away on a regular basis. This is the amount of money you put away every single time you get a check. If it’s $20 a week, that’s fine. If it’s $100 a week that’s perfectly fine. You just need to put the amount away so that it’s there in case of an emergency. You decide how much you want to save but save something because it will really help you when the time comes that you need to pay for something and that savings account is there. It’s only to be used in case of an emergency.

The next is Keep An Eye On Your Credit Score. It’s very, very important that you run your credit at least once a year. I have had my credit hacked and it’s a good thing that I check it every year because if I hadn’t checked it I wouldn’t have known that I had gotten hacked. You can go to your bank and get a free credit report once a year and it’s really important that you do that.That way you can keep track of your score, you can keep track to make sure that nobody has gotten into it and damaged it and you can keep track if you haven’t paid something on time. Sometimes we forget and we don’t pay the bill on time and then it ends up damaging our credit and damaging our credit a lot.

The next thing is to Pay Your Bills Ahead Of Time. Just because the credit cards give you until the 15th of the month to pay doesn’t mean you should wait until the 15th to pay the bill. You need to pay the bill on time or early. My habit has always been to pay it early because you never know. Sometimes you need those extra days in order to get that payment to them on time. If you don’t pay your bills on time the damage to your credit report could be up to 30 points, especially on a mortgage. So, if you get in the habit of paying your bills on time then you’ll always pay your bills on time.

Those are some of my favorite things in keeping track of my credit: paying myself, living within my means, and just paying attention to the kind of money I put away in case of an emergency. Or, in some cases, I put money away to buy a new car. There have been other cases where I’ve actually put money away to buy a house.

So, set your goals up, These are some habits. Stick to them. Let me know how you are doing. Call me and if you are thinking about buying or selling a house let me know, I’d be glad to help.

Mary Ann Edwards Re/Max College Park Lic # 01103542 (562) 544-0449