My Personal Financial Statement

As a finance professional I am often regarded by others as someone that knows money. I’ve spent the last decade learning principles of accounting, investing, budgeting, cash flow management and other financial planning techniques. I spend most waking moments analyzing financial statements looking for opportunities to improve the financial position of my organization. I also spend a number of hours each month reviewing my personal financial statements.

It is funny how different my attitude is toward my personal financial decisions during the day compared to what I do at work. When I’m at a cash register for lunch or at the grocery store I often pay little attention to the amounts that I am spending. I consider myself a frugal person but I know that these are where my weak spots are—food. It is very easy to deviate from the monthly budgeted amounts, and most of the time I feel little remorse until I come back and review my personal financial statements. Reviewing my Personal Financial Statements each month allows me to know how close I am to reaching my goal of financial prosperity.

The Goal

It is impossible to reach goals that are never set. My life goals tie closely to my priorities which are, in order of importance, my family, my religion and my employment. As I observe those around me I am impressed that those whose priorities are similar to mine seem to be a little happier and go through their day-to-day activities with purpose. Taking a deeper look at these priorities you would see that the first two are full of "expenses" and the last is there out of necessity in order to fund the first two. Another item of note is that I spend a very large portion of my time at work and this takes me away from my home. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy work and appreciate all of the benefits and comfort that come from putting in a full days effort. I would prefer to put these efforts toward something more valuable and that has a longer reaching effect.
In order to make more room in my life for my first two priorities, one of my top goals is to achieve financial prosperity. I define financial prosperity as being completely free from all debt and having enough in reserve to comfortably support my family into perpetuity. As with any goal, in order to achieve it I've got to have a plan. In this blog I'd like to share with you my plan to achieve this goal.