Hey guys, welcome to my Monday Morning Leadership. This is Val Campbell. Thanks for joining me today. I share a personal finance checklist. You know, remember yesterday I covered what is financial literacy and why is it important, and I kind of really looked from the macro level and sharing some of my journey as I discovered and learned more about and applied financial literacy.
So today I kind of wanted to book in that on a micro level, and I want to provide a basic checklist that doesn't originate with me, but kind of just a framework to help. Again, the background behind me I chose on purpose. One, I think it looks cool, I hope you do, but just kind of to visually give us an idea: our world, the pace at which things are happening, the technological changes, changes in business, finance all over are coming at us at an increasing pace. And we, we need some help to keep up, right? We need to know what's going on, being aware of it. So I hope you're going to find this list useful.
I also want to make it so that it can apply to anyone, not just someone starting a business, okay? Because that's not what it's designed to do. But this one here, I'll do a quick screen share, I think really is designed to help, you know, and it says it's hard to get your money right when you don't know where to start, right? You know, if we don't know where to start, what do we do, right? You got, if you're lost, you got to kind of first know where you're at. But you've got to get your money right, you got to know where to start. There's just a checklist again; it's not financial advice, it's financial opinion.
So I also want to, with that, do my due diligence and provide– excuse me guys for looking for my screen share here– a financial disclaimer, right? My channel content is for informational purposes only. It's financial opinion, not financial advice. You should not consider any information that I'm providing here or other material is legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice, Please consult a licensed financial advisor and do your own research before making any financial decisions. I just say that because I want to be responsible and I don't want to come across as somebody I'm not.
So, anyway guys, that is where we're at. So, book I'm reading right now by CFP John McGregor, he writes that unfortunately, thanks to the failures of our educational system, few of us are financially literate enough to handle money properly, right? And that includes me guys. I don't know about you, but I didn't learn anything, and again, elementary school, high school, college, really about managing money. Most of us haven't, right? If you do, you're the exception.
So here's some basic guidelines. One is find your money, right? I guess know where you're at. How many credit cards you have? I hope you don't have a whole pile of them because that's probably not going to be good. How much money do you owe, right? If you got credit cards, you probably got some debt. How much do you owe? And you know, where's your 401k from your first job? Do you have a 401k? How much are you actually spending every month, right? These are all pretty important things for you and I to know.
And we know, here's some statistics just to back it up, we know that 78 percent of Americans working full-time are living paycheck to paycheck. I shared a similar stat last week. And that represents a three percent increase from just a couple of years ago. The average American household debt, and here it is, and this might shock you but it shouldn't, is the average American household has almost $17,000 credit cards, they got almost $30,000 auto loans, $50,000 in student loans, $182,000 mortgages. So that totals about $280,000 total average household debt.
Guys, we've got a major debt problem with our government on the national level, but then just personally, people owe a lot of money and that really eats into your what you're able to afford, where do you live, and how much money do you for do you live on.
Number two, you want to organize your accounts. And again, there's not a deep dive in any of these, but let's just say now you know where your money is, right? You get an idea of what's going on. Life will be a lot easier if you have it all in one place. And this really comes down to know where your financial info is. Hopefully you don't just throw, you know, this in a desk drawer, this one over here, this one a file summer, so you really don't know where it does. We kind of keep all our stuff in one place. But keep things organized. Have some record-keeping system guys. It really helps, especially if you're, you have a business, you might get audited, you need to know where your stuff is. You know, you can use paper, computer files, what works best for you.
We use a little bit of both. And by keeping organized, you'll really save time looking for things, and you'll have a lot more time to work on other also important tasks.
More later
