Find a Personal Finance Mentor

Most of us want to improve our personal finances. Whether you want to earn more money or you want to learn to budget better, you can benefit from having a personal finance mentor. Your mentor is someone that can answer your financial questions, assist you in identifying your financial goals and offer advice for accomplishing what you want to in the realm of your finances. The relationship that you may have with your mentor may range from casual to formal but the benefits should be obvious either way.

To find a personal finance mentor, you probably don’t need to look any further than your circle of friends. There is always someone in our lives who does things better than we do. Spend some time thinking about who in your life has financial habits that you wish you had. You may even find that you have a combination of people that you can learn from. For example, your mom may be terrific at budgeting while your best friend may be a genius at negotiating higher payment from her employers. Consider all of the financial goals that you have and then find the people in your life who already live those goals.

The relationship that you develop with your mentor may be very informal or may be a more structured relationship, depending on what works best for you. You may simply begin asking your mom more questions about how she sets up a budget. Alternatively, you may tell your friend that you’d like to meet with her once a week specifically to talk about your goal to negotiate a higher salary. Try to keep the relationship stress-free. This is best done by being clear about your goals and showing that you respect the other person enough to take their advice.

If you find that you can’t get your financial goals met by working with someone that you know, you might want to look into paying for the services of a professional finance advisor. If so, spend some time searching for the right person who will listen to your goals and assist you in achieving them. Make sure that you approach the relationship with an open mind and that you focus on using the advice of the other person to better your own life. Many of us can be stubborn where our money is concerned but letting a mentor help shape us can make our lives a whole lot easier!

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 3:52 am and is filed under Financial Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.