A common question that eventually comes into everyone’s mind who lives alone is ‘How to manage finances being single and without help of parents or elder siblings? It becomes more difficult when someone is a single lady as then there is nobody but herself to take care of all expenses and finances.
One needs to train himself/herself to face all situations, as life can always show the board saying “please help yourself” in phases of difficulties. Being single, it becomes more important to take control of personal finances because of the following reasons:

• In case one has short term loans or debts (student loans, credit card debt, etc.), they need to be repaid.
• Savings and/or insurance is very important to have in case of any medical emergencies to continue to pay your bills
• Creating your own retirement savings is your own sole responsibility.
• Considering the present scenario, long-term or future expenses are likely to increase as with age, the earning ability may decrease.

It is always important to be smart with your finances and in order to become successful and to make balancing your budget a little less daunting, few easy-to-follow golden rules are mentioned below:

Set a Budget.
This is the first step towards managing the money. One can keep the expenses under two heads, one which are regular expenses as paying your rent, electricity and water bills, car loan etc. and second one that are related to one’s lifestyle like entertainment, shopping, restaurants, gym, etc. Once the list of expenses is ready, you can set your budget accordingly on the basis of nature of expenses.

Keep Tabs.
The next step after setting a budget is to start keeping tabs. It can be done through any budgeting websites or can be easily done in excel format. One should also stay up to date  on bank accounts. These days online and mobile banking has made it a lot easier to stay updated on recent purchases and expenses. One should also keep a watch out for any suspicious looking charges. In case any discrepancy is found, bank needs to be contacted immediately. Saving receipts is another way to keep tabs.

Pay It Off.
Getting into debt is never a good idea. There is a saying “only take that much a bite that you can chew otherwise you will have to take it out all”.  Getting into a knee deep debt is not only stressful, but it can also damage your credit score and impact you negatively down the road. One should always focus on a bigger picture rather than having focus on getting our temptations fulfilled. It’s always better to be smart to first pay of all the debts like study loans or any other loan taken to meet any necessity at the earliest before it becomes too big to create problems.

Get Covered.
One expense that can take away all your savings and can make you drown under a huge debt is your ailment. As we all have been hearing since our childhood that ‘Health is wealth’, it actually needs to be taken care of financially as well. Otherwise, whenever it gets bad, it actually takes away all your wealth. Therefore, having a quality health insurance is nowadays the priceless thing to have. One never knows when an unexpected injury, illness or accident will occur.

Think before you decide.
In this world of high speed internet when things are easily available at a mouse click it is very difficult to curb your impulsive purchase decisions. We end up buying even that something that is out of our budget. Easy accessibility of online shopping stores have made us so vulnerable to our urge of buying things that we even end up buying something that actually is not required. Try to think and be prudent before making any purchase decision. When the mind is stable, the decision taken proves to be more beneficial.

Treat Yourself.
After doing all the above mentioned efforts to help yourself in managing your finance, you deserve a treat. You need to treat yourself for doing a commendable job. After seeing all your efforts, you can easily predict the result and benefit that you are going to get out of it. So relax for a while and chill yourself so that you can regain the energy to maintain the continuity of efforts that you are making to make your future bright.

So what if you are single, cover yourself, have an emergency fund, start investing for your goals and start to move in a new direction that will bring an enormous positive change in your life by making future better. 

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