In honor of Financial Literacy Month, we created a microsite that offers 30 simple steps to financial wellness–one for each day of the month. To enrich the experience, we asked some amazing people to guest post during the month on a topic that is related to the day’s step. Their dedication to financial literacy is truly inspiring! Today, The Weakonomist talks about assembling a financial team.

So you’re getting your finances in order, but you haven’t yet mastered all aspects of financial literacy. That’s okay, none of us ever do. We can make our financial lives easier though by establishing a team of trusted advisors to help out. To help make better sense of who you need and when, let’s compare your financial team to a football team.

Quarterback: You are the quarterback. The quarterback is in charge of every play on the field. They decide who to throw the ball to, if they should pass it off to someone else, if they should make a run for it themselves, or perhaps throw the ball away and start over. You are in charge of your own financial destiny. You decide who gets what and when, and that decision should always be yours and yours alone.

Center: The center is the big guy who hikes the ball to the quarterback at the start of the play. Your tax advisor is your center. Before you (as the quarterback) ever see the ball on each play, it must pass through the center’s legs, just like before you ever get paid you pay taxes to the government. Your tax advisor can help you with setting up the proper withholding taxes, and help you at your annual or quarterly tax meetings to optimize your returns. After the ball is hiked, the center will also help protect you from the other team trying to get you. By the same token your tax advisor will help protect you just in case the IRS or some other regulatory agency has a problem with your tax filings.

Guard: Another protector of the ball and quarterback is the guard. He lines up next to the center. The guard in your financial life is the lawyer. Your lawyer will help protect you and your assets from all the governments (and relatives) that may come after you. There are lawyers that specialize in estate planning, bankruptcy, and any other legal matters you may need to attend to. Make sure you find one that is a specialist in your area.

Running Back: Many plays the quarterback will run rely on the running back. He stands behind or beside the quarterback and can do a variety of tasks. He can block, run the ball, and go out for a pass. The versatility of the running back is akin to the versatility you can get with a financial planner. Your financial planner can help you with investments, debt management, estate planning, budgeting, and even taxes.

I recommend finding a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) as they are required to meet education, experience, and ethics requirements. If you have assets around or above $500,000 consider finding a CFP that is also a member of NAPFA; they are the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors and they only work on a fee basis, as opposed to a commissioned position.

Wide Receiver: Sometimes the line breaks through and all your guards aren’t able to protect you from the overload. You’ve got nowhere else to turn but to look down field. You throw up a Hail Mary pass. Your ball is caught by the wide receiver! This is your credit counselor. Despite our hopes to not to rely on a credit counselor, they are there when you need them and can often get you out of the tightest spots of your finances.

Remember a team is only as good as the individual players on your side. The positions I listed above aren’t everyone you may need on your team to keep your financial house in order. You want to surround yourself with friends and family that support you in this journey.

The Weakonomist fell in love with finance at an academic level and then migrated his way into personal finance. Read more on his blog Weakonomics.com.

In honor of Financial Literacy Month, we created a microsite that offers 30 simple steps to financial wellness–one for each day of the month. To enrich the experience, we asked some amazing people to guest post during the month on a topic that is related to the day’s step. Their dedication to financial literacy is truly inspiring! Today, the Money Coach Brad Hawkins discusses identifying expenses.

As you begin, be encouraged that you are opening the door to a new financial life. To accurately handle your finances you need a detailed budget or spending plan. A spending plan will determine how much money will go to what expenses. Within a spending plan you have four basic elements: Income, Fixed Expenses, Variable Expenses and, most importantly, Periodic Expenses.

Income
The goal of successful budgeting is learning to live within your means. Your “means” is your income - the money that comes into your household. Review your bank deposit statements, pay stubs and find your income.

Fixed Expenses
Every month you have costs that do not change such as mortgage, rent, car loans and insurance premiums. These are fixed expenses. Go through your payment records to see what you have paid as fixed expenses over the last couple of months. This will remind you of your spending patterns. List them on the budget form.

Look at a short training video on building your budget.

Variable Expenses
These are handled similarly to fixed expenses. Find your variable expenses (grocery, eating out and personal items) and list them on the budget form.

Periodic Expenses
You should establish how much money you will need to put away each month to cover your periodic expenses. You plan for these “almost certain” costs by adding the amount for each item you will “more than likely owe” and dividing that total by twelve (months) to get the monthly periodic expense amount.

Look at a short training video on adjusting your budget.

Adjust your budget when you find you are spending more than your income. A good budget takes three-to-six-months of adjusting to be accurate and work properly. Another important item is TRACKING. A BUDGET WILL NEVER WORK IF TRACKING DOES NOT ACCOMPANY IT.

We have a tendency to view money and money management as an isolated and independent part of our lives. This mindset is one of the most common causes of financial failure. Most of us react toward money based on emotions, erroneous beliefs, and improper behaviors.

iMoneyCoach.com offers a ten-course training system that will help you maximize your future finances.

In honor of Financial Literacy Month, we created a microsite that offers 30 simple steps to financial wellness–one for each day of the month. To enrich the experience, we asked some amazing people to guest post during the month on a topic that is related to the day’s step. Their dedication to financial literacy is truly inspiring! Today, Mary, the writer of SimplyForties, talks about making a commitment.

“Annual income twenty pounds; annual expenditure nineteen, six and six; result happiness”, says Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, “Annual income twenty pounds; annual expenditure twenty pounds, ought and six; result misery.”

Everyone knows that just as in dieting where we must eat fewer calories than we burn, in finances we must spend less than we earn. It’s very easy to say, not always so easy to do! The key? Commitment! In order to succeed, to really change your life, you must make a commitment to the process. You must commit to keeping on track and sticking with it until you get where you want to be.

So, you’ve decided that you want to take control of your financial life. Now what? Make a plan for how you’re going to live on less than you earn. If you want to succeed, focus on making a plan that allows you to live well on less than you earn. If your plan leaves you struggling to survive, struggling to find some tiny bit of joy in your life of doing without, you are setting yourself up for failure. To use the diet analogy again, if you ate nothing but carrot sticks and rice cakes all day you would definitely lose weight but how long could you keep that up? No matter how sincere the commitment, I doubt any of us could stay on that diet for long!

In the same way that an overly strict diet will practically guarantee failure, an overly restrictive spending plan will make it very difficult to stay on track and succeed. Be realistic about what you are able to do without. Can’t give up satellite television completely? How about downsizing? Going from the unlimited package to one hundred channels might be doable. Can’t give up going out to eat altogether? How about restricting yourself to once a week or twice a month? Can you live with that? If you currently eat out several times a week, think how much you’ll save by making that adjustment.

Depending on the size of your current financial disaster, you may have to stick with this plan for quite a while so you need to be able to live with it. Once you’ve got things under control, you’ll need to stay on a financial “maintenance” diet forever so keep that in mind when you are slashing through your expenditures. You are trying to craft a new lifestyle so be sure yours is realistic.

When you are building your new budget, be sure you include a little fun but be thoughtful in how you do it. Finance a date night with your special someone but instead of dinner in an upscale restaurant and tickets to a show, how about a picnic and a walk along the river? Not your style? How about a museum and a poetry reading? Still want that fancy meal out? How about lunch instead of dinner? A matinee instead of the main show? Find a way to adapt what you like to do. Give it some thought. There is usually a less expensive alternative.

The secret to honoring your commitment is making your plan something you can live with. If you build in rewards for meeting your goals, make sure you don’t go overboard. In the same way you wouldn’t reward yourself with a chocolate cake for every pound you lose, don’t throw away a week’s spending cuts on a big Saturday blowout.

Commitment is the key to success but you will need to be realistic and flexible in order to stay on track. You will also need to be forgiving. If you fall off the wagon, dust yourself off and get back on. For most people, really making a change in our financial lifestyle is a “two steps forward, one step back” process. If you give up the first time you get off course, you will never succeed.

Take a good hard look at your financial life and, if you are not happy with where you are, make a commitment to change. Be realistic, be flexible, be forgiving and you will be successful!

SimplyForties is a 47-year old single mother of a college-aged son who is navigating her way through midlife and documenting it at http://www.simplyforties.com, where she writes about personal finance, relationships, grown children, the environment and social responsibility. She lives in a small rural town in far west Texas where she tries to live a better life every day.