Assembling Your Finances is a cohesive set of three workshops that . . .
-- Provides you with tangible and tactile means to command your financial behaviors -- Strengthens your skills to make effective choices in the money marketplace -- Guides you to create visuals that motivate and celebrate your financial stories
Wo r k s h o p 1
y o u r b a s e l i n e
Workshop 1 is about taking an inventory and an assessment--a brutally honest assessment--of your personal finances. You'll examine and define the true numbers that make up your financial formula: a set of factual points of reference from which you can objectively evaluate change.
Also during Workshop 1, you'll begin assembling the documents of your comprehensive money management system. Money is about numbers, and those numbers need to be tangible--at hand, honest and written down.
Learning activities: - Define the factors of your financial baseline - Determine your true income - Assess the scope of your expenses - Initiate your money management system
W o r k s h o p 2
Y O U R C O M P A S S
Workshop 2 you'll use the information you've gathered through your homework to refine and expand your financial formula. Likewise, you'll learn how to calculate ratios for the purposes of contextualizing spending and determining how debt may--or does--impact your financial choices.
Further, you'll examine and evaluate the money marketplace via the four points of a financial assessment compass. In conjunction, you'll learn and practice the math skills that every confident financial negotiator must command.
Learning activities: - Calculate ratios as a demand on our true income - Examine techniques for controlling and/or reducing expenses - Evaluate methods and savings strategies - Analyze the full costs of renting other peoples' money (a.k.a. debt)
W o r k s h o p 3
Y O U R S T O R I E S
Workshop 3 is all about your financial stories.
First you'll learn the history, the role and your rights regarding the stories that others tell about you: your credit files and FICO scores.
Second, you'll participate in an exercise to deconstruct and demystify the annual story you write about part of your financial baseline: your income tax filing.
Learning activities: - Learn the commercial and legal history of consumer credit files & FICO scores - Identify your rights and the process (under the Fair Credit Reporting Act) to correct information in your credit files - Define strategies to improve your FICO credit scores - Outline the story constructions and steps for filing your federal income taxes