Tag: Financial Wellness
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Everything You Need To Know About Pay Yourself First Budgeting
Pay yourself first is a form of reverse budgeting, a financial management strategy recently(ish) gaining popularity. Unlike traditional budgeting, where you allocate a certain amount for each expense category, reverse budgeting starts with your income and encourages you to save a certain percentage while allowing you to spend the remaining amount freely. How Reverse Budgeting…
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26 Ways to Use Your FSA
What is a flexible spending account, or FSA? As the year winds down and open enrollment begins, it’s a great time to look at your flexible spending account. FSA stands for flexible spending account. It allows you to use pre-tax money (saving you on taxable income) for healthcare. You choose the amount you wish to…
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Emergency Fun(d)
What is an emergency fund? An emergency fund is a reserve of savings used expressly for unplanned expenses or financial distress. Whether medical bills or a car repair, an emergency fund is a cushion that absorbs those unexpected expenses. Ideally, an emergency fund will keep you from raiding your retirement savings or, worse, taking on…
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Why You Should Use an Independent Financial Advisor
There are a lot of financial advisors out there. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the United States has approximately 263,000 personal financial advisors. There are 3,330 St. Louis financial advisors, according to U.S. News. St. Louis has a lot of financial advisors and financial planners for a city of its size. For a St.…
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Is It Better to Pay Down Debt or Invest?
One of the most common questions a financial advisor gets is paying off debt vs. investing. More specifically, is it better to pay down debt or invest? Should you delay retirement savings to pay down a mortgage or student loans? Should you pay off debt before starting an emergency fund? The simple answer is that…
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A Financial Wellness Guide for Millennials
We often think of wellness in terms of physical or mental health. Paying lots of attention to them, we often spend a lot of time, effort, and money trying to focus on them. To achieve a better quality of life, we focus on our mental and physical health. We rarely talk about money. It’s so…