When the economy begins to wobble like a newbie on roller skates, people understandably get nervous. They have no idea what to do with their money to keep it safe from the wobble. The good news is, much of the time, adopting a common sense approach to money remains the best course of action. If you’re in this boat, here’s what you need to know.
1. Create a Doable Financial Plan
When times get challenging financially, it’s easy to lose sight of your financial goals. Creating a written budget reminds you of where you’d like to be financially and helps you to think more clearly about your money during times when doing so is difficult.
Seeing your budget on paper gives you a concrete reminder of the money you have coming in and going out. It also sets you up to execute the next step in your hard times financial plan: controlling expenditures.
2. What’s Within Your Control?
Once you’ve created a zero-based budget, you’re in a position to start cutting out some of your expenditures. Your budget written in black and white shows you what you can afford to keep and what you can’t.
For example, maybe you go through the drive-through at your favorite coffee house or out to lunch every day. Purchases like those usually aren’t necessary and are often splurges that waste money you could use elsewhere.
3. Build Up Your Savings
The money you spend on non-essential purchases works better when it’s sitting in your savings account during tough financial times. Unfortunately, no one knows how long hard times will last, as many have learned in recent months, help is often slow in coming if it comes at all. It’s best to help yourself by putting as much money as you can into savings.
4. Invest in an IRA
When money gets tight, it’s tempting to stop investing in your IRA for a while. However, this is usually a mistake.
For one thing, even the most difficult times pass. For another thing, your retirement years will arrive before you know it. If you’ve robbed from this account, you’ll pay for it later. That being said, if you’re worried about how solid your IRA is during volatile times, think about investing in a gold IRA. A gold IRA is a retirement account that uses gold and other precious metals as investments.
According to the experts at Goldco:
“A gold IRA is an Individual Retirement Account in which physical gold or other approved precious metals are held in custody for the benefit of an IRA account owner. It acts similar to a Traditional IRA, only instead of holding paper assets, it holds physical precious metals.”
This type of IRA offers you the same type of tax advantages that more traditional stock-based IRAs do. However, they also offer you the stability that’s typically associated with gold as an investment. In other words, it offers you the same growth potential that other IRAs do while at the same time offering you the peace of mind you need to get through uncertain times.
Final Thoughts
Getting through tough financial times requires you to plan where your money will go. It also requires you to think about saving and investing aggressively, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense to do so. However, taking such steps ensures that you’ll have money to get you through even the most difficult times.
Interesting related article: “What are Savings?“