It might involve you writing your will, to oversee how your family will survive after you go on a comma or you suddenly die. It’s a matter of spending money without forgetting what is around the corner. Probably a house that you plan to build after ten years. To get the best results, you can hire a financial planner, or you can take several online financial planning courses and learn to plan for yourself. You can then even sell your services to other people and businesses. Here, you are going to learn about financial planning and the courses you can take online.
Top 5 Rules of Financial Planning for Individuals
1. Have a plan, be rich
The urge to be rich is real. Everyone wants to. A plan will guide you through even if global and domestic events hurt your investments, as it will help you stay on track. Planning touches on every aspect of your finance, including insurance, taxation, and achievement of your goals.
You can list out what you need or want and use your capital where applicable to start your plan. Calculate the worth and identify where the money will be needed in the future.
2. Manage your money
To manage your money should be fun, and if you come from a financial background, you will understand how vital it is. Just commit yourself. Saving money is the first step to financial management.
Saving money can be helpful. Imagine yourself in an emergency, and you have to borrow money from a relative or friend. What if they don’t have enough? You might be forced to swipe your credit card, and that is an expensive debt you are placing on your shoulders. Solve the problem by saving.
You might be asking yourself, “How can I save?” As soon as you get paid, set aside different heads like expenses, EMIs, investments, and savings. The money that remains after you sorted your bills, save it.
3. Never ignore taxes
Death will never go away, and so are taxes. They will always be there. Even your body will be taxed in the morgue. So, you should stop ignoring them or pushing away, or your tax body or IRS will come for you.
Look at it from this angle. You pay them, you reduce your losses and boost your gains, you fail to, it goes the opposite. If you need, you can ask for help from a tax professional, but don’t be late. It’s advisable to have three sections that include tax-saving investments which take care of deductions and exemptions, tax payment, and lastly filing your returns.
Have a specific calendar where you can mark those important dates because you might get confused by the upcoming dates, and pay penalties you would have avoided.
4. Control your expenses
You should start by considering the fixed expenditures, then urgent ones, necessities, and luxury, then close with the avoidable ones. That will help control your spending. Consider creating a budget as a commitment, and you can even use apps like Mint or Mvelopes.
5. Plan for retirement
A few decades ago, planning for retirement was a serious affair as it’s today. The retirement age hasn’t changed, but the life expectancy increased. Also, you might suffer from chronic diseases, and healthcare costs are hitting the roof.
The earlier you begin preparing for your retirement, the more comfortable you retire. So, you need to understand how much money you will require every month for your bills after you retire. Calculate your retirement contribution using a calculator, and you will see how much you will have by then.
Online Financial Planning Courses at Udemy
You want to study something from the comfort of your home or office, and you really don’t want to enroll to an institution? Udemy is here for you. The internet has made it possible for anyone in the world who has a phone, computer, and an active connection access information from where they are. In a world where people are thirsty for education, Udemy has thousands of courses to choose from.
Udemy also has a range of business courses, about 3000, including business management courses online. Other courses being offered are online financial planning courses, both for individuals and for businesses. You can pick any of the courses according to your interest, and you can begin at any time and whenever you are comfortable. Udemy courses don’t require you to abandon your daily routine. You have to set some time aside and learn.
Some of the courses offered:
1. Financial planning & analysis: Building a company’s budget
When taking this course, no experience is required. The tutors will take you through the basics and educate you more as you build your knowledge. You will learn everything in the course. It will consist of 30 lectures.
Some of the things you will learn from this course are how to prepare a company’s budget from almost nothing, calculate the net flow of cash, forecast the sales of your company, estimate the capital needs of that company, and construct an integrated financial model.
You will also learn to perform top-down forecasting and bottom-up forecasting, be able to forecast the planned level of production in a company, forecast the different types of expenditure, and be able to carry out the roll-forward of a fixed asset.
This course is recommended for anyone who wants to boost their income. It will guide you through the fundamental financial planning principles and give you the clue of how a business prepares a budget of its own. The lessons are in the form of videos and cover some technical topics like revenue forecasting, working capital development, fixed assets roll-forward, cost planning, and cash flow calculation. Take the course and have an experienced instructor guide you through.
2. The complete financial analyst course 2019
For this course, you only need to come as you are, no experience is required, but knowledge about Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint is essential. If you plan to advance your career in finance, this course is the best for you. A financial analyst career pays well. Even when the job markets are tough, the candidate with this course finds jobs. All you need to do is take the course and edge the other candidates.
You haven’t probably seen how analysts in bigger firms work, and that’s what this course will help you find out. It covers several topics such as accounting, financial statements, finance basics, business analysis, and capital budgeting.
By the time you complete the course, you are able to carry regular tasks faster, work with significant amounts of data, to format spreadsheets professionally, and create Microsoft Excel’s charts. You will be able to perform industry analysis, understand 10-k reports, and perform an analysis for financial statement among many more skills.
3. Creating a financial plan for your business
It’s not really hard to get your company’s financials together. If you want to know how to obtain funding for a company or managing your business with no worries, this is the course that you should take.
The requirement of taking this online course is having a clue about business accounting and familiarity with Excel and Google Sheets because you will be required to feed your data.
The course will help you know how to create and manage your business’s financial plan, how to forecast its business, forecast its expenses, and create and understand your cash flow statement.
It will also expose you on how to overcome obstacles while creating your financial plan, how to create and understand your income statement, and how to build a staffing model for contractors and employees.
4. Four fundamentals of financial planning
The course has 20 lectures and will help you master these four fundamentals so that you can achieve your goals. The tutor shows you how to control what goes in and out of your bank account and helps you live the life you wish. You need to be open and willing to perform some work on some financials.
The course will equip you with skills such as planning for lucrative opportunities, unexpected emergencies, and understanding the power of compound interest. The course is for small business, homeowners, and entrepreneurs.
5. Introduction to financial planning-CFP Certification
The module is an introduction to financial planning, and a candidate should be cleared from grade 12th. Having extra knowledge of Finance is an added advantage. The course will help you implement the process of financial planning through a procedure, understand potential goals that a client will have.
You will also understand various regulations that should be adhered to while implementing financial plans, the primary tools of financial management, and the economic, social, and political environment and the way in which financial strategies should adjust to those environments.
Financial planning is not a skill that you can be born with. You have to learn. It would help you on a couple of things if you decided to take lessons. To get a promotion at your workplace, or to ensure your business grows bigger than life, enroll in online financial planning courses.