MONEY HACKS: Is Your Cash Flow Aligned with Your Summer Plans?

Individuals and families are eager to (safely) get back out to restaurants, sporting events and concerts, and vacation while consumer prices are hitting multi-year highs. This means that your night out or week-long vacations are starting to be more expensive. This is a great time to revisit and review your cash flow plan and make sure that you’re spending during the rest of 2022 (and this summer, particularly) is aligned with your income coming into your household and your financial goals for 2022 and beyond.

Resources:

• Log-in to your MyMoneyNav account to use our Cash Flow Software!
• Need help budgeting? Create a customized Spending Plan!
• 5 Questions to Ask Yourself When Creating A Budget
• Do You Have a Handle on Your Cash Flow?
  

Any money questions you’d like answered? Our Money Hacks series is created from conversations we have with employees, investors, savers, and all people planning for their financial futures. What topics are on your mind for our next episode? Email us here!

Video Transcript:

Hey, this is Alex Assaley, and its episode number 93 of Money Hacks, the unofficial start to summer. We're in mid-June, and I'm sure you're looking forward to kicking off some type of summer plans, whether it's taking a little time off work, maybe a vacation getting back to a little bit of a normal environment.

Although recognizing, you know, as we emerge from two-plus years through this pandemic, there are different risk tolerance levels and, and comfort levels for everybody. We realize that more and more normalized eating out, vacationing, and having a good time in the summer is, is emerging here in 2022.

And with that, there's also been really, really high levels of inflation or increased costs. Probably the biggest area we see this is at the pump, at the gas station. As the price of gas has risen pretty dramatically here this year. Groceries are becoming more and more expensive. There's no question that over the course of the last year, we've seen this increased cost in really almost anything, everything in our everyday lives.

While this has rattled, the financial markets it's been also impacting our budgets and how far our money stretches at home as well. So, this is a great time to reassess your financial picture. What my colleague, Kacy Reece, our marketing manager referred to as cleanse your spending habits.

We're big believers in cash flow management of using that as the foundation for how you get on track for financial security and financial success. We've talked about that in prior Money Hacks videos on how to set up and or revise a cash flow management or a spending plan so that you have a good idea of all the money coming into your household and where that money is going to pay for different required, fixed, and variable expenses and aspects of your lifestyle.

Given just everything that's been happening over the course of the last several years, emerging out of a pandemic high rate of inflation, increased costs, wanting to do more things. This is a great time to revisit your cash flow. Revisit those monthly expenses you have, perhaps some of them are subscription-based expenses that you don't even think about every month, but you're sending companies like Disney+ or Netflix or, you know different types of food delivery and ordering services to really look at and decide if you're getting value out of that monthly subscription, out of that recurring costs, that could be eating up a bigger chunk of your budget than you expect.

So, we've got some great tools on the MoneyNav website where you can build out a cash flow plan. For those who are also a part of our MyMoneyNav platform and community. You can go online into your dashboard and aggregate your accounts to have a live, on-demand cash flow and spending plan that you can track in real-time.

These are great tools to help you improve and take steps towards financial success, but you can also do it simply using pen and paper, an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever way is right for you, where you can get good clarity into your overall cash flow on a monthly and annual basis. I think this is really an important time to assess that and make sure that you're on sound footing when it comes to your financial picture.

If there are areas that you're struggling with, perhaps, spending more than you're bringing in on a monthly basis having, you know bad debt like credit cards or personal loans that you're trying to pay down and pay off. We're happy to work with you and find ways where you may be able to target those areas to improve your financial picture.

Check us out on social! Tons of resources at MoneyNav.com that you can use to leverage and, and work towards your cash flow plan in improving your overall financial life. Hope you're doing well and have a great summer and look forward to hearing from you. Thanks!