People often ask, “What’s the best piece of financial advice you can give me?”
That’s a loaded question, because financial success isn’t magic and can’t be boiled down to one thing.
A quick Google search will yield countless tips or “tricks” you might use to get ahead, but piecing together a coherent plan from these can be difficult.
If you’re not in a place you’d like to be financially and want to take better control of your money, you need to change your behavior.
And I’ve found that many of us have a better chance of reaching our financial goals if we automate the means to get there.
You may already do this in some form or another. You’re reading this financial column, so you probably know you should set up an automatic investment into your retirement plan with each paycheck.
But you may not know that you should set up your investments to automatically rebalance each quarter to stay in alignment with your goals for funding your retirement.
If your goal is to save for a down payment for a house or a new car, create a separate savings account and automatically transfer an amount to it each month until you hit the goal.
You also should set up automatic payments on your credit cards so it’s harder to accumulate credit card debt.
If there’s a way to automate the steps you need to take to reach your goal, you should do it. It’s harder to fail when it’s automatic.