10 money management tips for a secure financial future 

Are you the boss of your budget? Even if you don’t feel like it right now, you can sharpen your skills and get a handle on your finances. It’s time to take back control of your money—and feel great about doing it—with our money management tips.   

10 smart money management tips and tools 

You likely have basic knowledge of money management. But maybe you want to take your skills to the next level? Accomplishing that is all about getting financially organized. 

Getting financially organized is a three-tiered life skill that involves: 

• Setting realistic life and financial goals 
• Responsibly handling your debts with effective budgeting 
• Establishing a sustainable financial routine to build wealth 

It takes work to build your financial foundation. You’ll need to dig deep and change your psychological and emotional relationship with money. But once you start to change your mindset, your actions will follow suit. You’ll begin to see your financial situation change and feel more in control of your destiny. 

These 10 tips can help you rewrite your financial future. 

1. Identify your financial traumas 

Our finances sometimes cause stress and discomfort. As a result, it might be tempting to avoid your financial situation rather than face it head-on. After all, it’s easier to distract ourselves from the problem rather than do the hard work of learning how to manage our finances.  

This avoidance—and the negative feelings about money that cause it—is often called financial trauma. Even without realizing it, we carry the effects of past financial events with us. How that trauma affects our behaviors and thoughts about money can be long-lasting.  

Avoidance is one of the many symptoms of financial trauma. People often neglect taking the necessary steps to improve their financial situation because they feel stuck. They may face debt they don’t think they can overcome or be exhausted by the daily treadmill of living paycheck to paycheck. Fortunately, there are ways out. 

Recognizing your financial trauma for what it is and taking steps to change your money habits is your road map for getting back on track. It won’t be easy—experiences throughout your life shape your relationship with money. This can impact your feelings and actions toward money on a deep, subconscious level and cause resistance to changes, even positive ones.  

Awareness of what’s blocking you is the key to stepping beyond budgeting and eventually mastering your money. You might unlock that awareness through journaling, seeking financial education, or even seeing a local therapist. Once you’re aware of your hindering beliefs, work on flipping your beliefs and behaviors around money to more beneficial ones. 

2. Boost your financial knowledge 

Investing in your financial knowledge is an investment in yourself, empowering you to take control of your money. 

Expand your financial knowledge with credible books, websites, and podcasts. Attend online or in-person seminars, and check your local library for no-cost programs on financial stability and investing.  

YouTube can also be an invaluable resource for improving financial literacy, providing a vast library of step-by-step videos on personal finance topics. Its video format is ideal for visual learners. 

Remember to be a critical consumer of information when using YouTube or any online resource. Look for qualified, experienced, and transparent creators. Check for sources and citations, and be wary of information that seems too good to be true or overly biased.  

3. Set financial goals 

To gain financial control, take specific small steps, such as creating an emergency fund or paying off smaller debts first. Reaching some goals early gives you the motivation and momentum to keep moving forward. 

If you’re dealing with financial trauma(s) (as outlined in the first tip), collecting small wins early on may be the best way to attack your financial hurdles. As the saying goes, “The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.”  

While your financial problems may seem like mountains, attacking them in small increments—through small, attainable goals—will turn them into molehills until they eventually disappear completely. 

4. Identify your wants versus needs 

Distinguish the difference between your wants and needs. This helps you cut down on emotional spending. And it’s OK to have wants—we all do. But giving in to them can hold you back from building your savings and reaching other goals. 

Additionally, confusing needs and wants is easy without a financial road map to guide you. That’s why one of the smartest money management tips you can implement is creating a budget. It doesn’t need to be anything complex, and we’ll give you some tips for crafting one later in this guide. Ultimately, though, having a plan can help keep your expenses in check and even open the door to saving and investing. 

5. Know your credit score 

Lenders and financial institutions rely on this score to determine whether lending you money is a good idea. Knowing your credit score and how to improve it is one important way to keep track of your financial health. There are a variety of apps and websites that allow you to check your score for free without impacting it. There are also plenty of resources to help you build or repair your score.  

6. Automate your money 

It might seem counterintuitive, but automating your finances can increase your financial awareness. Automating bill payments helps avoid missed due dates, late fees, and dings to your credit score. It also frees you up to focus more on bigger-picture money management practices like budgeting, saving, and investing. 

If you have online accounts with your credit cards, utility companies, and mortgage companies, log in and set up automatic payments. You can generally have monthly bills withdrawn from a checking account or charged to a credit card. With or without online accounts, you can most likely call a customer service representative and have them set this up for you.  

7. Create a budget 

Tracking your income and expenses is a crucial step toward taking control of your finances. Look at your household’s money to uncover opportunities to save—these can help you quickly get on the right track. 

If you’re unfamiliar with how to make a personal budget, you can start by: 

• Calculating your income. Be sure to add the income from your job and other sources, such as investments. It’s important to update this number as you switch jobs, get promotions, and move your career forward over time. 
• Totaling your expenses. Include everyday bills like utilities, housing, food, and transportation. Be sure to also include any student loans, gym memberships, and other recurring monthly expenses. It can be easy to forget these, so double-check your bank statements when you think you have every expense on your list. 
• Balancing your books. Once you sift through all your financial papers and arrive at those two numbers, the rest is easy. Subtract your income from the expenses and see where you land. 

8. Track your spending 

Once upon a time, you had to track your expenses manually. People would log every expense into a ledger or checkbook to ensure their “book” was balanced at the end of every week, month, or year. Fortunately, there are apps and other tools for that now. From your bank’s online system to independent financial tools, you have a variety of options to help you keep track of your spending. 

9. Make a plan to pay off debt 

Debt, especially high-interest consumer debt, can take a big chunk of your monthly income. Just knowing you have outstanding debts or upcoming expenses—such as annual tax payments or holiday shopping—can contribute to money-related anxiety. But you can tackle any problem with the proper plan in place. The trick is to take it one step at a time. 

Here are two effective strategies to help pay off your personal debts: 

• The avalanche method: Categorize your outstanding debts by interest rate and pay off the highest-interest debt first. Then move to the next highest and so on until all your debt is paid. 
• The snowball method: Make the minimum payments on all your outstanding debts and put any extra money available toward your smallest debt balance. Then, after that debt is paid off, use the money you’ve freed up to pay off the next smallest debt, and so on. A potential downside to this method is that higher-interest debt may take longer to pay off.  

10. Implement a money management plan 

Once you get an idea of your income vs. your expenses and begin tracking your spending, you’ll need a new framework to stick to for managing your money in the future. Old habits got you to where you are currently, so you’ll need to actively work to change them. 

The good news is that a money management plan can be as straightforward or as complicated as you want. If you wish to implement Excel spreadsheets and formulas, go for it. But if you’re starting from square one, you might try a simpler beginner strategy. 

One such money management strategy is the 50/30/20 rule. This rule lays out the percentages of your income you should allocate to each “bucket” of your life: 

• 50% of your income should go to your needs bucket. These essentials include housing, utilities, food, and transportation. 
• 30% of your income should go toward your wants bucket. These are things like clothes, shoes, golf clubs, vacations, eating out, and other leisure-related expenses. 
• 20% of your income should be left over after the first two buckets. This 20% is for your savings bucket. Use this to save for retirement or invest. Consider working with a financial planner or investment advisor to help you determine the best ways to save. 

Demystify your money 

Once you change your old beliefs and educate yourself with some money management tips, you’ll feel empowered instead of dread. So, shed those old beliefs and implement the actionable steps we’ve given you to create your overall financial plan. Knowing your plan and sticking to it can help you take control of your finances.  

Browse Intuit’s library of financial literacy resources to dig deeper into topics like personal finance management, investing, and budgeting.