1. Improve Your Financial Condition | Mohali Karan Arora 13 Best Money Skills to Learn Everyone likes to have money. They may not have a need to be rich, but it is certainly nice not to scramble to find creative ways to pay your bills. However, money and finances are certainly skills, and unfortunately they are skills that most people have not learned. There are skills in frugal living, budgeting, personal finances, debt management and reduction, saving, investing and more. If you want to learn a new skill, and you don’t know the skills of finance these would be a great place to start. They can help you make more money, spend less, keep more of what you make and even save money for investment, property or a future, “something special”. 1. Creating a Personal Budget You need to start early to set yourself up for financial success in the future. If you spend beyond your means, you are setting yourself up to accrue debt and develop a poor credit score. Budgets are a lot easier with some good software to back it up.

2. I recommend you check out MINT to help you to create a personal budget that is reasonable for your income and lifestyle. MINT is a great system that links together many essential services that will help you create (and manage) your budget. If you are clueless as to what a budget is, how to make one that works and how to manage a budget once you have one, I recommend you check out this class on basic budgeting below. 2. Make Purchases and Get Cash Back One of the big problems in our credit heavy society is all the little fees you pay. You pay to get money out of an ATM. You sometimes pay a small fee to HAVE a credit card. You pay huge fees if you are late with payments. And, of course, you pay interest on your purchases. It can be nice to turn that around by getting cash back from your purchases. One of the best ways to make and save money is to have an app do it for you automatically on purchases that you make every day anyway. Using an app like Dosh will give you 5% cash back on certain purchases and it is as simple as just downloading the app and linking it to your credit or debit card. 3. Track Receipts Tracking receipts is one of the keys of keeping a good budget. These days you don’t need to keep every document on hand. You simply need some system to store you receipt documents. I take pictures of all my receipts with my phone and store them on Evernote for when/if I need them. (Learn how to Master Evernote.) But there are even simpler methods. Using software like Neat allows you to track your receipts and documents. The software extracts the key information from your receipts and integrates it with accounting and business software to help simplify how you work. This will help you keep your finances organized. 4. How to Repair Credit If you do find yourself in a financial pitfall, you will need to restore your credit to be able to make large purchases in the future such as a home or a car. It is important to learn how to repair your credit in case you find yourself in a situation where you don’t have the credit you need to buy something that is important. The simple answer to repairing credit is make deals on defaulted loans, getting those huge minus off your credit record. Then making payments larger than the minimums to pay down debt quickly.

3. 5. Apply for Loans and Credit Cards Some people are too scared or lazy to apply for loans and credit cards. Using money that isn’t yours can be extremely powerful, both for better and worse. But you can never enter the territory of trying if you never even applied. You DO need credit cards to build your credit rating. The important thing to learn is that you don’t need to build a balance. If you only buy what you can afford, and pay it off almost immediately, you get all of the good parts of a credit card, with none of the negatives. 6. Manage Your Debt If you learn something new every day, I wish more people would learn the skill of managing debt. This simple skill can help get you out of mountainous debt and get you to the point where your money goes to buy YOU things. Not pay off interest to corporate fat-cats. After you owe money, remember that managing your debt is a simple matter of making timely payments and paying in a way that pays off the debt in the fastest way that’s reasonable. In other words, don’t use your rent money to pay off your debt, but it might also help to brew coffee at home sometimes and put that extra money towards your debts. 7. How to Save, Spend and Invest Spending money is the art of using your money as you see fit to improve your current situation. Saving money is the art of cutting back and resisting the urge to spend for the sake of your future situation. Investing money is the art of spending money for future gains. All of these arts are essential financial skills to learn. But the most dangerous can be investing. Investing has incredible upside. It can make money on top of your money, and hopefully at some point lead to independent wealth or comfortable retirement. 8. Weighing Risk and Reward With all decisions come risk and reward. Some situations are more risky while others are more rewarding. The trick to making these decisions is to consider all potential risks alongside all potential rewards and try to figure out whether or not the choice is really worth the risk.

4. 9. Save Money Part of managing your money is learning how to save it. It is important to live within your means and keep some money aside for when you might need it in the future. You don’t want to have to always take out a line of credit when an emergency comes up, so having a healthy savings account is a great way to have a safety net. Saving money is a skill. Check out the link below for some tips to help you save more of what you earn. 10. Conserve Utilities Sure, it may be easy to walk out of a room and forget to turn the light off. However, making the effort to turn off your lights and appliances when they are not being used in your home, office, or apartment can help save you a significant amount of money when it comes to your monthly utility bill. You might be surprised how many people do not conserve utilities, and by how much can be saved by being diligent with this specific skill. And, of course, as an added benefit being good about not wasting gas and electric is a nice positive for the environment. 11. Stock Investing Skill Whether you’ve inherited some money or you’re saving money every month, you might be wondering about how you should invest your money to make it work for you. Learning how to invest your money is actually easier than a lot of people assume it is. You do not need to be an experienced trader to be successful in the stock market and in fact, it is often best to not move your money around very often. While you may have heard that the best time to begin your investments was “yesterday,” don’t rushinto making investment decisions that you don’t really understand. Take your time to learn about the stock market, bonds, mutual funds, and trades. Once you learn the basics, you will have the confidence to put yourself on the right path. 12. Property Investing Skill Property investing is not a “get rich quick” scheme. But having real estate education will give you a solid foundation to a long-lasting business. There are a lot of possibilities that come along with investing in real estate and getting a step-by-step guide to analyzing, investing, selling, and flipping real estate can be very beneficial to you in the long run.

5. 13. Invest Money (the Easy way) Okay. This one is more of a hack than a skill. One easy way to invest your money is to use a service like Acorns. Here, all of the purchases you make are rounded up to the next dollar and the change is sent to your savings account. For example, if you buy a cup of coffee that is $4.50, you will pay $5 and 50 cents will go directly into your savings. Also Read : 15 Mental Skills to Learn | Mohali Karan Arora Source