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Let's face it. Managing your personal finances can be a difficult task " especially when on a tight budget. Every time you turn around, there's another bill to pay, and before you know it, your entire paycheck has been spent " and then some! Soon, you find yourself drowning in the financial demands of everyday life, and the vicious cycle of living paycheck to paycheck " or worse yet, living on credit " has begun. You ask yourself, "How did this happen to me?"
If you are finding it increasingly difficult to juggle the many different financial aspects of your life, you are not alone. The fact is, in today's modern society, the average consumer is forced to allocate the money from one stream of income to more than 30 different sources! From mortgage payments and health insurance to childcare services and credit cards, it's no wonder money appears to continually vanish before our eyes. But what if there was a way of reducing the invisibility of your spending? A way of budgeting yourself in a simple, pain-free manner and achieving that so-called state of "financial freedom" once and for all? Thankfully, where there is a will, there is a way.
I found a great personal finance software program called Mvelopes Personal. Mvelopes Personal is the new affordable and easy-to use online budgeting system sweeping the world of personal finance, is the answer to all your budgeting woes. Mvelopes' unique budgeting concept offers a straightforward method to reining in your finances, enabling you to spend less and spend more efficiently while still enjoying what matters most to you in life.
Gone are the days of discovering how much you have spent after it's too late to do anything about it. Instead, Mvelopes enables you to take control of your finances now by tracking the current balances within each of your designated financial software envelopes as you are doing the spending. In this manner, at the click of a button you will know exactly how many of your allocated dollars have been spent from each of your envelopes, thus leaving yourself better equipped to avoid going over your limit.
This real-time money tracking is made possible through a transaction download service, which is just one component of the Mvelopes Personal Budgeting system. Add to that the optional bill pay service, the financial portfolio management service and the outstanding free budget coaching all included in the package as well, and the result is your number one source for assistance in managing your personal budget.
Isn't it about time YOU took control of your finances and embarked upon the path towards financial freedom?
To learn more about how Mvelopes can help you to start making better spending decisions, or to sign on right away for your one month free trial offer, visit the Mvelopes homepage at www.mvelopes.com.
By Kristen N. Carpenter
Kristen has a keen interest in personal budgeting and finance and is a marketing
communications specialist.
25 businesses you can start and run from home.
This article appeared in Appraising the Value of Finance, a special editorial supplement that was mailed with the February 1999 issue of Business Finance, sponsored by Andersen Consulting.
The finance function is being shaped by four forces at work on a global scale: the growing demand for finance to take a leadership role in shareholder value creation, the globalization of markets and operational models, the need to take costs out of the finance function, and the drive to leverage new technology. Any one of these forces would be enough to create profound changes in the finance function; the combination of the four is sufficiently powerful to reset the entire agenda for finance in the next century. The unifying theme in the new agenda is a strategic role for finance that goes well beyond anything before.
Geoffrey R. Lane, managing associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP?s finance and cost management consulting group in New York, describes this new role as a shift from a compliance focus to a focus on value-added analytical activity. "Because the world is more global and, consequently, the pressure on profits is greater than ever, there?s a tremendous push to understand the financial dynamics of a company?s portfolio of businesses at a level of detail that previously was achieved by only a small number of companies. Now a majority of firms are trying to achieve a similar level of financial sophistication. The main driver is globalization, but even in U.S. industries that are not particularly global, companies are intensely interested in understanding the economics of their business so they can create greater shareholder value."
Although the new strategic role may be described in slightly different terms in different corporate contexts, the persuasiveness of the theme is unmistakable. Ask Frank Brod, global director of accounting for Dow Chemical Co., Midland, Mich., about the role of finance today, and he?ll tell you immediately that finance is being reshaped by a new focus on business success ? the value-added strategic consulting that the finance function can bring to the entire organization. "This is quite different from the focus in the past," Brod says, "when the finance function was involved in programs for total quality management and reengineering, but primarily geared to transaction processing ? it was a very internal perspective." Today?s companies are restructuring finance in more of an outward direction, he explains, "so that the finance function thinks and contributes outwardly by understanding what?s going on in the company and in the marketplace and helping to create a strategic view."