5 Tips to reduce your financial anxiety

One of the most awful feelings is when you know you have bills to pay and you don’t know where you are going to get the money from. Our Director, Karen, has been in this position and knows just how difficult it is. So we wanted to share some basic tips that could ease your anxiety when it comes to money.

1. Organise all your bills to come out of one devoted bills account

If you have just one bank account, open a new one and make that a devoted account to paying your bills. Then each month you can transfer an amount (or set up a standing order) into that account. This means that whatever is left in your normal account is yours to spend. You can easily see exactly how much disposable income you have. This can take the pressure off and allow you to work out how much you have to treat yourself with.

2. Make yourself a personal cashflow spreadsheet

Every month, grab your bank statement and make a record of all the incomings and outgoings of your account into an Excel spreadsheet. You can use sums to calculate the exact amount you need to pay every month to cover your bills. If you have bills that fluctuate then take the largest amount and round up slightly. Then you’re less likely to be caught out by a large bill. This means you can also see if bills increase so you’re never taken by surprise. If bills decrease, then you can reduce your monthly bill payment.

P.s. If you don’t feel confident with making a cashflow spreadsheet you can always contact us. We run a series of Excel webinars that could help you. The webinars are only £20 + VAT.

3. Open a savings account

A savings account is a brilliant backup plan and a way to treat yourself all rolled into one. Whether or not you have anything to save for, at the moment, doesn’t really matter. You never know when you might need that money. You can either set up a standing order to go into your savings every month, or you can put funds in ad hoc. A savings account can help prevent you from spending your savings because it’s in a separate account to your spending account.

4. Take out a 0% interest credit card

Credit cards are life savers if used carefully. We have all been there when your car has broken down, or your boilers leaked or you maybe you need expensive dental care. This is the perfect time to have a credit card. Often card companies offer deals such as 0% interest for 2 years, which is a much safer option than payday loans that charge huge amounts of interest. Credit cards are also much safer to use than debit cards when making large payments. It’s much easier to get your money back should something go wrong. Just ensure you ALWAYS pay the minimum payment on your card, then your credit rating is safe!

5. Diarise your contract expiry dates

Work out the dates your mobile phone, internet, and other supplier contracts will renew. Give yourself a grace period beforehand to do some shopping around. So many people end up automatically being thrown into a new contract with a dramatic price increase which they could have prevented. If you diarise these dates then you can prepare and potentially save yourself a lot of cash.

We hope our tips have helped you, please do pass them onto others. Together we can all feel a little financially safer if we support each other.