The title of this book pretty much sums it up.

One Year to an Organized Financial Life by Regina Leeds basically lays out a week-by-week plan for getting your financial house in order. The book is divided into twelve chapters (months), each containing four subsections (weeks in a month), and each of those sections details how to take control of a specific aspect of financial life.

The end result is something that feels very much like a detailed plan to follow. Personally, such a plan gives me mixed feelings – while it’s great for a person who just wants to be told what to do, I’m a big believer in understanding your finances and your motivations and, at times, this book feels more like a “just follow these steps” kind of guide than a “understand what you’re doing” book.

The big question, though, is whether the information is worthwhile. Let’s dig in.

January: Take Control
More than anything, this opening chapter focuses on information management. Quite often, people’s personal information is in a very unorganized state, with cards and receipts jammed in purses and papers tossed into boxes and filing cabinets. The solution? Start from scratch. Clean out your purse and figure out a good place to put that stuff. Start a real financial filing system. Even more important, go through your mind and start asking yourself why you make the choices that you do.

February: Assess Your Finances
This month is all about creating a budget. The process is standard by now: record all of your expenses, then parse them into groups that make sense to you, then from there figure out what you should be spending in each category and shoot for that new target. My concern here, though, is that to set up a really accurate budget, you need more than just a month. You have to record your expenses over a longer period of time than a mere month to get an accurate grasp on your money. Although the procedure here makes sense, stuffing it into such a short timeline does not.

March: Get Ready for Taxes
This chapter summarizes the process of doing your taxes. Collect your documents and your relevant receipts. Decide whether or not to use a professional or do it yourself. Then, take the plunge – fill out the paperwork and file. It’s a process that most of us (painfully) have to go through each spring. A big key suggested here is to start a filing system now to store all tax-related documents throughout the year so that when you do your taxes the following year, all of the receipts and other materials you need are ready to go.

April: Spend Less, Save More
Frugality is the buzzword here. This chapter focuses strongly on cutting your expenses – much of the advice is right in line with the ongoing “Trimming the Average Budget” series on The Simple Dollar. Hand in hand with that kind of trimming, though, is the need to actually save what you’ve been cutting, because the tendency often is to take that money and spend it on things that you seemingly couldn’t afford before, thus raising your standard ...

Really, the alter is pretty easy. I produced the option to stop counting the worth of my home as an asset in my net truly worth calculations. I also did the precise exact same with our automobiles.

Let’s back once more up a bit. I’m a big believer that calculating your net truly worth - which is your complete home minus your complete debts - is the best way to maintain track of your typical financial progress. If you’re producing great progress, your net truly worth will go up every and time you calculate it (or at least have a potent typical constructive pattern, because you can’t deal with the brief phrase fluctuations of the stock marketplace).

It’s pretty easy to calculate it. You can both use a personal finance gadget like Quicken or, a lot better but, >>>>create your personal net really worth calculator in a spreadsheet<<<<. I calculate mine every and month utilizing a spreadsheet (even though Icff08#17;m nsering gingukea extreme try when the new Mac edition is released later on on this yr).

As I talked about in the prior, >>>>I was using the assessed value of my house and as an asset for calculating my net really worth<<<<, and that pushed me properly into constructive territory typical. By this type of as the worth of my home as an asset, it was a biexss t t construcveone,000 truly worth.

But every and time I calculated my net truly worth, I asked myself about the home and the automobiles. Could thy truly be ...