In your life, money is somehow can be known as your blood. If you have good blood, you have a happy life and a healthy body. While having bad blood will cause you a lot of trouble.

And you have good blood when you know how to use your money wisely and make it works for you, to create the results that you expect to have in your life.

Your blood will be bad when you don’t know how to treat with your dollars effectively which leads to many problems in life that are related to money.

No.1 typical financial problem: Live paycheck to paycheck

More than 78% of American workers live paycheck by paycheck in 2019.

This is an insane number that is hard for us to believe but it’s real from one of the biggest economies on the planet.

At present, there are more than 20 million people who are jobless in American right now, increasing up to more than 15 million during this pandemic time.

It also means that many people can’t pay for their bills, food, and be homeless when they don’t have any savings and live paycheck to paycheck in this country.

This is a sad story but also an alert for any of us about the risk when living paycheck to paycheck.

We all don’t know and can imagine that in 2020 the world can face a global pandemic and lead to close borders and millions of people being jobless for months.

But this is the way how life works.

Always full of unexpected things that can happen that we can’t control. But if you just live paycheck to paycheck, you even face more troubles in life when things happen.

Solution

The best way to stop living paycheck to paycheck and make a guarantee for your life when any bad things happen is by earning more money and having an emergency fund.

By doing these things, you can protect yourself from unexpected risks as pandemics and even can invest better for your future.

And while the experts told CNBC that we need to have an emergency fund with at least 3 to 6 months income for safety reasons. I recommend that you should have this fund for up to one year time.

So you will be totally safe if having anything unexpectedly happen in your life.

A clear example is the coronavirus pandemic.

Like in Melbourne, Australia, where I am living, the city is lockdown for nearly 6 months, and still don’t sure when it will finish.

If you lost your job during this time and don’t have enough savings, it is very tough to survive without support from the government (but the fund is not suitable for everyone yet).

And better than expected support from the government or others when you face a similarly hard time like the pandemic, you need to start to save for your emergency fund from today. This is the safest way for you to work on.

No.2 typical financial problem: Don’t know where the money goes at the end of each month

Just around 15 months ago, I face this issue all the time when I didn’t know where my money went every month.

Even I don’t buy and own luxury pieces of stuff, the amount of money I spend every month is still a huge number. Because I spend a lot of money on eating outside, buying snacks, small stuff that I think is cheap.

But when all of them combine together, it up to a few thousand dollars per month that I spent on.

Later on, I recognized the reason is that I never have a limitation for myself and don’t track when and what I spend money on. This problem is not only me have but also many of my friends are facing.

And if you also feel surprised whenever it comes to the end of the month when you see the total spending, and you don’t know where you can spend that much money, I totally can understand your feeling.

Solution

To stop this problem, you need to practice a new habit called “Tracking your money”.

It means that you will track all your money spending every day, and even give yourself a limitation on the amount of money that you can use in a month. By doing this, you will know how much money you can spend and how you use your money.

For me, now, I allow myself to spend up to $200 a week and have a notebook that I will write in all my spending. To save time, I normally just count all my spending one time a day in the evening and write in this notebook.

You can choose to use notebook or note apps (whatever you feel comfortable with), but keep in mind the idea of this method is tracking every dollar you spent. So you can know exactly where your money has gone every month.

No.3 typical financial problem: Want to be rich by exchanging hours for the money

This is not the way how you can make a fortune.

Because you only have 24 hours a day. And if you can work all 24 hours (an impossible theory) with your average salary per hour is $25/hrs (a really good salary in the developed countries, most countries will be lower).

It means that you can earn up to $600 per day. That’s good money if count per day. But if you do an extra calculation, it means you can earn around $18,000 dollars per month.

This is the maximum you can earn if you work all 24 hours a day with a good average salary at $25/hrs. But actually, nobody can work that many hours.

And normally, that $18,000 dollars will be 3 to 4 months salary if you work 9–5 jobs (not for a single month, except you are the CEO or leader of very big companies).

Solution

You get rich by having your own business or investment.

And the solution here is to let start your own business or have a side hustle income from today.

If you are good at writing, you can start your writing career on Medium to earn money as Tim Denning (he makes $11,000/month from his stories on Medium only from 2019, and now absolutely more than).

Or you can start your Youtube channel like Kevin in Meet Kevin channel, which talks about finance and educational content (what he learned or read on news) and earn around $200k per month.

And there are more than a dozen ways that you can earn money besides your 9–5 jobs from online and offline that I can figure out.

The key to being rich here is from having your own business and investment.

This is when you work for yourself and be paid by the clients, not from your boss who asks you to stick at the desk from 9–5 to send emails and prepare documents for him.

4. Lack of personal finance plan

Let be honest with yourself when answering this question.

Do you have a personal finance plan for yourself in the next 6 months, 12 months, 3 years, or even more?

This is a question that you need to be clarified as soon as possible. Because when you don’t have your own personal financial plan, you don’t know how much money you need to save, how much you can have, and what you can do with it in the future.

It looks like you are on the journey to find treasury, you know your golden cave locates in the forest, but you don’t have a map to show you which way to go in this forest.

Your financial plan is your map, and if you want to find your gold in a forest, you need to have your map firstly.

Solution

So how to create an effective personal financial plan?

This is a question that you can find a lot of answers to on google in just a second.

But for me, I create my personal financial plan based on answering the following questions

• What is my current financial situation now?
• How much money do I need to spend on average every month?
• What is my biggest financial goal after (X) months?
• How much money do I need to save until this time?
• Can I find any extra sources of income to add in?

These are the 5 main questions I ask myself and try to write down the answer as much detail as I can. Based on doing this method, I already have my financial plan for 6 months, 1 year, 2 years.

And by reviewing my plan every week, I can track and adjust my activities and working plan to help me achieve my personal financial plan in my targeted time.

You can choose to use the same methods as I do, or you can try to apply the steps methods from WikiHow, or “The 1-Page Financial Plan” from Forbes magazine.

These are some of the other good options for you to create your personal financial plan effectively.

No.5 typical financial problem: Think that having more money means less real happiness.

The reason never comes from having too much money that leads you to less happiness. The real problem comes from the way how you use your money.

Just have a look in your city, the places where normally have high criminals rates come from the poor areas, not from the rich suburbs.

This is because when you don’t have money for food, education, health,… you have a higher tendency to be criminal (because you don’t have anything to lose) compare to when you have a happy family, good education, food on the table, and a healthy lifestyle.

But when you have a lot of money and you don’t know how to use it properly.

You spend on gambling, buying luxury stuff, and having parties,… (These things you can do just when you have money) but it is also the reason why you get into more trouble and feel unhappy with your life.

Because you are using your money to waste on the material things and doing the things that ruin your life as gambling, overnight parties.

And this is a reality that many families face, especially when the kids don’t understand the values of their parent’s money and use it uncontrollably.

Solution

If you want to be happier when you have more money, you need to learn how to use it wisely and don’t be controlled by the dollars.

A good education about personal finance will be a great foundation for you to do it. And whenever you are going to spend the money (doesn’t matter it is a small or big amount), let ask yourself this question

Will my life be better or having the positive results when I spend money on this thing?

If the answer is “YES”, let do it.

Because when you have a lot of money, you will have a lot of options to choose from.

If you choose the options that can bring positive impacts such as paying for a trip to travel the world, join in a life course, investing to make more assets,… your money is doing a good job to make your life be better.

But when you choose to spend on negative things like an expensive bottle of wine for overnight parties, gamblings,… your money is real your trouble.

Final thought

We all need money to have a better and happier life.

And actually, the money itself is no problem.

The real problem comes from the way how we choose to use it.

And if you have a wrong mindset about money when using it, obviously, the more money-related problems you will have. It makes the sentence

“The more money you have, the less happy you are”

become true.

But when you can use money in the right way with the right mindset

The more money you have, the happier you are.

If you want to read more about personal finance topics, let check it out at “Wiki Personal Finance”.