Welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast this is episode 62. Tonight Andrew and I are going to continue our series on personal finance. Tonight we’re going to talk about managing personal cash flow.
Andrew why don’t you go ahead and start us off and we’ll chat a little bit between each other.
Andrew: all right let me get some wild and crazy ideas out there cool. how am I put this nicely so there is a term in the fitness world that is called F around itis and it’s made popular by a guy who runs Lean Gains site his name’s Martin Berkman and basically the whole it’s like a great blog post went viral that all those sorts of things and basically his big thing with the reason why so many people aren’t finding progress in the gym is because they’re they have this condition called F around itis.
And it’s basically because when you’re going through the gym you’re trying to do everything you can but if you don’t sit down and write things down and track it and measure and see where your progress is going. Then you don’t actually make any progress and you end up just kind of spinning your wheels.
Another business management guy’s name is Peter Drucker he has a quote and he says if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it. And so I think when we talk about personal finances and you really try to get to the bottom of figuring out how to improve how your personal finances are working because it’s all like kind of a chaotic mess.
Everybody solutions going to be kind of different and that’s why you have the personal part in personal finance. However, there is that key point that you need to be tracking something and measuring something and so I think Dave and I can throw out some ideas of how we feel about measuring the way that your money is flowing through your life.
But if you really want to make progress and improve a just to be aware of how your money situations moving this time goes on and beat to hopefully see that progress and just by measuring it and tracking it has a bi-effect of making that situation better for yourself.
I definitely have what works for me when it comes to tracking my personal finances I’m sure Dave has the system and I’m sure you take 10 people off the street and whether they’re financially whether or not I’m sure everybody else has their own situation to their own system sorry.
It’s going to be different hopefully we can just throw out some ideas and if it’s something that speaks to you then you can make it stick. But the whole point of this episode I think is that when it comes to your money you don’t want to have a frown that’s you don’t want to be just enough flailing your hands blindly you want to have a plan and you want to have measurements and you want to be tracking your progress.
I know this is not some sort of straight linear path trust me it’s not like they say success is never a straight line there’s always bumps in the road and when you look at finances I think that applies 110%. I’ve definitely seen in my own life and I’m sure other people can speak to and relate to that as well.
Just when you think you have things sore that something major always pops up around the corner but there are ways that we can still take on those obstacles and those challenges and still make progress moving forward I think the most important part of that is like what Dave says is managing your cash flow and having in my mind it’s budgeting but I think having any sort of measurement system in place is really the first and probably the most important step.
Dave: I totally agree with what Andrew was saying I think if you can’t measure what you’re trying to improve on you’re never really going to prove upon something and I really like what his...