The 7 Biggest Threats To Your Money

Your financial health is crucial in ensuring that you have a comfortable life and future for yourself and your family. This is why you have to take the necessary steps to ensure that no harm comes to your finances. Unfortunately, there are many obstacles to building and maintaining your wealth. 

Here are some of your biggest financial enemies and what you can do about them.

Lack of planning and discipline

Planning and discipline is absolutely crucial when it comes to money. In order to ensure that you have enough money to last you and your loved ones throughout several decades, you need to have a solid, well thought out plan, and the discipline to see that plan through.

The same goes for your financial investments as well. You need to properly plan out a sustainable investment plan that works for you and stick to it no matter what. Discipline is the key for long term success. If you take things for granted and leave midway through, you may end up losing out more than you stand to gain.

Start training yourself by creating a budget and try to avoid unnecessary expenses. If you are spending more than you earn, the math will never add up, and you will start losing money. Instilling discipline unto yourself is a long process, but it is something that will pay off eventually.

Materialism

Yes, it might feel good to get that fancy new smartphone or a brand new car. But in truth, we don’t really need them, do we? It is imperative to understand the difference between necessity and luxury. Once you are in a comfortable financial position and have achieved a large chunk of your goals, only then does it make sense to splurge on luxurious items. You would be surprised by how much you can save by trying to live a simple, non-materialistic lifestyle. 

Material things can be achieved when all your primary goals are achieved. Until then, don’t let material things take higher priority over your financial success. Try to make what you have now last as long as possible.

Debt

Debt is a part of everyone’s lives, though not all debt is bad. For some, living a debt-free life would be ideal, while others might feel that leveraging debt is the right way to go. The key to having healthy financials is to understand how much debt is good and how much is bad. 

Remember that good debt allows you to manage your finances more effectively, to leverage your wealth, to buy things you need and to handle  unforeseen emergencies. A bad debt is when you borrow money to purchase a depreciating asset – meaning that it begins losing value the moment you obtain it – or on something that you don’t really need. If you do not manage your debt well, you will find that it will be one of the biggest threats that will eat into your financial goals before you even realise it. Always plan out your finances and calculate how much debt you can take on before making any commitments.

Taxes

Taxes are an unavoidable reality. All citizens in Malaysia are obliged to pay taxes once they qualify for it, but not to an extent where you pay more than required. Tax planning is vital in ensuring that you do not part with more money than you need to every tax season. Take the time to try and understand all the exemptions that you can leverage to minimise your tax payments. When tax season is around the corner, many platforms will start to release tools and calculators that you can utilise to help determine what exemptions you qualify for and help you to reduce your tax liability.

Inflation

The hidden threat that has the potential to wipe your returns clean if you don’t pay attention. It won’t do it all at once, but year after year, it is a force that will slowly eat away at your finances by increasing the prices on goods and services over time. Sooner or later, you will notice that your money will be worth less than it was.

You need to diversify your income and start investing into options that will grow your wealth. If you keep all your money in a savings account, inflation will slowly eat away at its value as low interest rates struggle to keep up. While yes, savings are important, especially for emergencies, there are such things as too much savings.

Poorly planned investments

Investments are an excellent way to grow your wealth. However, if you don’t plan your investment portfolio right, it can become an obstacle to your financial success instead. Make sure you have the right asset allocation and are invested in the schemes that align with your risk tolerance and goals. It will not be a simple task to strike the right balance for you, but the time you take to outline the perfect investment plan will be well worth it. Also, do not get overly emotional or attached to your investments. Sometimes you may win big, and sometimes you may lose some. Mistakes will happen, so the best course of action is to learn, educate yourself, and continue forward.

Unforeseen emergencies

Sooner or later, an event that requires you to spend money will suddenly appear. Unexpected events like these will undoubtedly impact your financial success. Things such as unemployment, illness, injury, or your car just breaking down can happen at any time. Unless you have an emergency fund that has the ability to address the emergencies or insurance to cover costs, it is going to be a struggle. 

Therefore, while doing your taxes, investing, and planning your expenditure, make sure you also set aside some money to go into an emergency fund. The future is always uncertain, so there is no harm in always being prepared for the worst case scenario. Signing up for health and life insurance can also help future-proof your finances. iMoney can help you with that by connecting you to a wide variety of medical and life insurance issuers.

Address each threat with the right strategy

While there are many dangers to your wealth, each of them can be addressed with the right strategy to alleviate some of their threat. While there is no instant fix solution, approaching each threat with the right plan and mind set will allow you to address each problem and ensure that your wealth grows at a steady pace.