How to Get Better at Anticipating Your Financial Needs

By Trent Hamm 

Getting Started

Home » How To Get Better At Anticipating Your Financial Needs

One of the most valuable tools for keeping your financial life as stable as possible is to improve your ability to anticipate your future expenses and financial needs.

This enables you to take some steps to prepare now for those expenses and thus reduce their impact in the future.

For people who aren’t naturally familiar with planning ahead, this can feel like a major shift in thinking. Many people simply buy groceries as needed by visiting the grocery store and wandering through the aisles to grab items needed for their next few days worth of meals. Many people respond with chagrin when they find an unexpected bill in the mail.

 When you live your financial life solely in the moment, you cost yourself a great deal of money. Often, you find yourself with inflated regular expenses like the higher cost of unplanned grocery shopping.

You’ll also regularly find yourself “surprised” by fairly predictable financial events, and that can frequently cause people to go into a bit of credit card debt just to get through it.

A much, much better approach is to learn to become better at anticipating financial needs. There are expenses in your life that you know are coming, so if you take at least some action now regarding that expense, you’re going to be able to handle it easier when it comes due.

While this is far from a be-all-end-all list of everything you would need to do to become perfect at anticipating your upcoming financial needs, here are seven things you can do that are quite useful in terms of making upcoming expenses clear to you and preparing yourself for meeting those needs.

Buy Groceries As Though You Won’t Enter a Store Again for the Next Week

It’s easy to go to the grocery store and get items for one or two meals. You just wander through the aisles, picking the items you need for those couple of meals, and you’ll probably grab a few incidental goodies on the way.

The first problem with this approach is that it takes quite a bit more time than necessary. The time spent wandering the aisles as you think about what you need is time that could be spent elsewhere.

The second problem with this approach is that it doesn’t take advantage of what’s on sale. Sure, you might happen to notice a sale and use it in those meals, but you’ll often miss sales entirely or have no idea what to really do with a sale item.

The third problem – and this is the big one – is that it doesn’t take into account what you already have at home in your pantry. You may already have most of what you need for a good meal or two sitting in your cupboards or refrigerator or freezer, but you didn’t even take them into account.

A much better approach – one that anticipates your future needs – is to start off your grocery shopping at home by making a meal plan for the upcoming week. Go online and grab your grocery store’s sale flyer, then build a meal plan that’s based upon what you have on hand and things that are on sale in the flyer.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.thesimpledollar.com/how-to-get-better-at-anticipating-your-financial-needs/