The activity: Begin your trek.
The trek: Improve cash flow and use net worth to supplement income.
The terrain: Prosperity Quadrant IV (negative cash flow; positive net worth).
Difficulty rating: Easy
This trek focuses on using net worth to supplement income while working to increasing income and reducing expenses to improve cash flow.
This trek has activities to:
increase earnings and
Continue reading Special Situations: Begin Your Trek to Improve Income and Expenses and Protect Income and Assets
We’ll focus on two types of steps for the “live within your means” part of the trek.
Earning Steps
understanding how we can add value in what we do
career moves we can make that will improve our income
strategies that we can use to find a job
creative ways to improve our income stream
Spending Steps
understanding the factors that affect
Continue reading Trek IV: Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: Introduction
The activity: Explore how to reduce spending.
The trek: Improve cash flow and use net worth to supplement income.
The terrain: Prosperity Quadrant IV (negative cash flow; positive net worth).
Difficulty rating: Easy
The topics of “cash flow” and “living within one’s means” can’t be fully addressed without including the topic of “spending”.
Cash flow is comprised of two components:
Continue reading Special Situations: Income and Expenses: How to Reduce Spending
This step on your prosperity trek…
This is an informational step.
Spending money makes us happy.
One reason we find happiness in shopping is that we are never really satisfied with what we currently have.
There is a term called “hedonic treadmill” that refers to our constant need to obtain the hedonistic happiness we get from buying things.
The hedonic
Continue reading Trek IV: Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: Spending Money Makes Us Happy
This step on your prosperity trek…
This is an action step for families that don’t have a spending plan.
This step will improve cash flow and build net worth by finding opportunities to control spending and debt and freeing up cash for saving.
Difficulty rating: Moderate
Use the Prosperity Concierge Spending Plan Worksheet to Create Your Spending Plan
Putting your
Continue reading Trek IV: Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: Create a Spending Plan
The activity: Develop a budget and use it to track income, spending and saving.
The trek: Improve cash flow and use net worth to supplement income.
The terrain: Prosperity Quadrant IV (negative cash flow; positive net worth).
The activities on this trek you should complete before beginning this activity: Create a Spending Plan
Difficulty rating: Moderate
Use the Prosperity Concierge Monthly
Continue reading Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: A Budget to Earn, Spend and Save
The activity: Reduce food costs.
The trek: Improve cash flow and use net worth to supplement income.
The terrain: Prosperity Quadrant IV (negative cash flow; positive net worth).
Difficulty rating: Easy to Moderate
Your food expense, if you’re like most households, makes up a substantial portion of your total household spending.
Prosperity Concierge’s resources to reduce your food expense.
Here are some
Continue reading Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: Reduce Food Costs
This step on your prosperity trek…
This is an action step for families to reduce their dining costs.
This step will improve cash flow by reducing entertainment and food costs.
Difficulty rating: Easy
Reducing your dining costs can be a very quick and effective way to reduce your overall expenses to improve your cash flow.
It’s very easy for restaurant
Continue reading Trek IV: Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: Spend Less on Dining
This step on your prosperity trek…
This is an action step for families that have auto insurance.
This step will improve cash flow and build net worth by reducing auto insurance costs.
Difficulty rating: Moderate
There are plenty of ways you can lower your insurance costs. Here are some tips:
Reduce Coverage
Reduce coverage for an older vehicle. If the economic
Continue reading Trek IV: Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: Auto Insurance
There are some really simple things you can do to easily reduce your energy costs. These steps cost little and pay-off quickly in reduced energy expenses.
Here are just a couple of ways to save money by lowering energy costs:
Use a setback thermostat. The thermostat costs approximately $40 and can save you roughly $500 a year.
Continue reading Trek IV Special Situations: Reduce Home Energy Costs
The activity: Reduce routine purchase costs.
The trek: Improve cash flow and use net worth to supplement income.
The terrain: Prosperity Quadrant IV (negative cash flow; positive net worth).
Difficulty rating: Easy
Coupons and buying in bulk are easy ways to save money when buying routine purchases for products or services we buy on a routine basis.
Coupons
When you know
Continue reading Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: Reduce Routine Purchase Costs
Increase Your Tax Exemptions to Improve Your Cash Flow
If you get large tax refunds every year you can give your cash flow an immediate boost by having more of your income on your paycheck and less of it withheld.
Instead of providing the government with an interest-free loan increase your exemptions to get the money sooner.
Continue reading Trek IV Special Situations: Increase Tax Exemptions
Looking for ways to spend less to drive your car? Consider these steps:
1. Drive Less
Not using your car as much will help it to last longer. Look for opportunities to replace some of your driving trips with walking, biking, carpooling or using public transportation.
2. Make Fewer Short Trips
Short trips of less than 10 minutes can
Continue reading Trek IV Special Situations: Reduce Car Ownsership Costs
The activity: Manage the income stream to improve your cash flow.
The trek: Improve cash flow and use net worth to supplement income.
The terrain: Prosperity Quadrant IV (negative cash flow; positive net worth).
Difficulty rating: Moderate
Your Income Stream
Your income stream has three sources:
Income from your job;
Income from borrowing and adding to debt;
Income from tapping into your wealth.
Income
Continue reading Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: Manage the Income Stream
If you’re unemployed, or looking for a career or employment change, you’ll want to implement a job search.
How to get a job can be separated into several phases:
The Job Search
Develop a Job Search Plan
Let the old adage “fail to plan, plan to fail” describe how important planning is to a successful job search. If you
Continue reading Trek IV Special Situations: Search For A Job
Connecting with people inside and outside of your organization will enrich your life and provide you with new opportunities.
Relationships at Work
Relationships at work are important for career advancement. Having good relationships also help us to be more productive.
Take some time to think about your relationships at work. Consider how well you have established good relationships
Continue reading Trek IV Special Situations: Do Career Networking
Simplify your life and save money by automating your bill paying. Paying your bills automatically won’t in itself make you rich. But you will save some time and some money. It saves you time because you won’t have the hassle of writing a check and mailing it in.
Consider these options to automate your bill
Continue reading Trek IV Special Situations: Automate Your Banking
Your home maintenance often protects or enhances the beauty of your home. However, home maintenance can also save you money every day. Here are a couple of additional things you can do to lower your ongoing energy expenses.
If your attic or basement is unfinished you can reduce your energy expense by filling in cracks
Continue reading Trek IV Special Situations: Lower Home Energy Costs
Consider these changes to save money on transportation costs. Owning a car is a significant expense for most households. So it stands to reason that households that need to improve cash flow should look for innovative ways to save money by making transportation changes.
By now, you should have explored initial steps to reduce
Continue reading Trek IV Special Situations: Lower Transportation Costs
Your earning potential should be directly correlated to your value to the company you work for. If you have a job a good exercise to evaluate your worth to your employer is to sell yourself. This exercise gives you a chance to explain to yourself your value to the organization.
In this exercise you explain why
Continue reading Trek IV Special Situations: Add Value to Your Job
