Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for June 3rd, 2008

… how do you know it ever happened? I remember reading that in a Tom Clancy novel and thinking that really does make a lot of sense, and it is very important in Financial Planning. If you have a plan, but you don’t write it down, can you be sure you are following the plan? How do you explain the plan to your spouse if you have not written it down?

If you don’t write down the cheques you write and the credit card purchases you had, how can you tell if one arrives that you don’t remember is fraudulent or not? If you write it down, you at least have an argument about whether it is real or not.

Records keeping is synonymous with Financial Planning and Financial Reporting and is an also an important of your home finances, and you must keep diligent records, as well.

This came across my mind when I revisited my mortgage repayment spreadsheet, which I use to figure out just how much longer I have to pay off my house (not as short as I want it to be), but at least because I wrote it down, I now know how long it should be, if I can live within my financial plan. Without that being written down, all I have is, “Maybe some day I’ll have my house paid off”, but to me that is not enough, if I don’t have a real number in my head, I don’t have a goal, and without a goal, it is unlikely I will succeed.

Tomorrow, I’ll do a quick run down of how to set up a simple mortgage repayment spreadsheet, which is a good estimator of how many days you have left to pay off your house.