You’ll be glad to know it doesn’t require any complicated maths to know your financial numbers there are no difficult calculations past the simple multiplication or division of a few numbers. Knowing these financial numbers and getting your head around the fundamentals of building wealth will give you a great head start in understanding what most people in the UK admit they struggle to understand.
Twenty-four million adults in the UK feel that they are unprepared and lack confidence in managing money which is alarming given there are only around 50 million adults in UK. This isn’t surprising and perhaps the figure is much higher as we tend by nature to place an overconfidence in our own ability for example if you ask 1000 people if they are good drivers, I’d expect almost all to say Yes when that is clearly not the case
We are all taught maths from primary school and by high school we are taught complex maths like trigonometry. I knew when I was sitting in a cold pre-fab maths hut staring out the window while trying to learn trigonometry (probably the same for 99% of us) that I would never again be called upon to use it. However, there are numbers and calculations we should have been taught in school and these are numbers we all have to deal with in life.
Most people in the UK seem to know their health numbers they know they should walk 10,000 steps a day, they know they should eat roughly 1500-2500 calories a day, they know what their Body Mass Index (BMI) should be but very few seem to know what their financial numbers should be. The questions you should be asking yourself are things like:
- What should my credit score be?
- What should my debt-to-income ratio be?
- What should my debt-to-equity position be?
- What % of credit card utilisation is considered healthy for my credit score?
- How much should I save from my income?
These are all things that people should know and discuss in the same way they talk about their health goals and their weight. We all go off track it’s perfectly natural as the media’s advertising power is designed to take money from us every time we watch television. We openly discuss our weight issues and our diet strategies over meetings at work and with friends but we don’t discuss our financial numbers and our financial strategies.
We don’t share what we think works and stupid mistakes we made to help others. In the UK we need to start being more transparent around money and financial health and that doesn’t mean telling everyone how much you earn or talking quantities of money with friends but it does mean sharing education and helping others in the same way we share and help each other with fashion or diets and exercise regimes.
Financial wellbeing is important and it’s not about having the most money it’s about having the freedom and being in control of your finances so you can live your best life. We are brought up on fairy tales we are brought up with the idea that someone will save us, the government will save us… by forget about it for now let’s buy the new car and sort our finances out later. Here is the reality no one is coming to save your family’s future except you, you need to be the one to take action.
There is a whole generation who will inherit wealth from the baby boom generation but if you don’t know how to handle money then you’ll make even bigger mistakes when you get more of it.
You are the only one who can take control of your financial future you have to be a willing participant in your own rescue. If you learn to ride a bike you can ride a bike forever without thinking. If you can play guitar you can always pick it up and play Wonderwall from muscle memory and it can be the same with your finances. Once you know your financial numbers and demystify the financial world which is purposely filled with jargon to confuse , you can feel empowered and in control.
Finance is not complicated it’s not brain surgery or Astro physics most of the people who work in finance are not university educated you can learn most of what they know relatively quickly when you make that decision to change your future and invest in yourself.
If you want to learn your financial numbers and start your financial future on track to align with your hopes and dreams then you have to start somewhere.
Contact me to learn your financial numbers and discuss your financial future