April is Financial Literacy Month – The Family CFO

April is Financial Literacy Month. I have written a couple of other articles this month after I discovered www.financialliteracymonth.com. I’ve been very impressed with the information contained on the site.

In fact, I’m going through the 30 step process myself! In my next articles, I’m going to highlight some of the steps that I feel can be important or most impactful.

Step 4: Set Yourself Up For Success, is one of these steps that I feel is pretty important. This step is about appointing a family Chief Financial Officer (CFO). This is the one individual responsible for the day-to-day financial tasks. Notice this is one individual. For continuity purposes it should be one person that will organize and handle this job.

Some of the family CFO tasks might include:

• Establishing online bill payment service
• Organizing financial paperwork in files or online
• Maintain financial and tax records
• Documenting household inventory

Steps 5 and 6 deal with getting copies of credit reports and cleaning up any inaccurate information. Your family CFO can also take care of this too.

Steps 7 and 8 address budgeting. Oh no, did I just say the “b” word? These steps are where you look at money coming in and going out of your household. I have recently been tackling budgeting myself. I changed the way I pay bills and discovered some costs that were getting a little high.

Calculating your net worth is also something I do during a financial plan. Net worth is adding up all you own (assets), then subtracting what you owe (liabilities).

In my next Financial Literacy Month article, I’ll tackle debt, financial priorities and goals, and cash reserves. In my opinion, some of the most critical steps in the process.

If you’d like some help with organizing or cleaning up your finances, write me at david@lexwealth.com, or give me a call for a free consultation at (859) 225-2596.