First Step to Financial Freedom

Around about now, most South Africans are sitting up and taking notice of the impact on our lives of increased interest rates and the occasionally, nearly frightening fuel prices.

Many of us have living the last couple of years in some form of excess - enjoying the fruit of a lifestyle bought on credit at lowish interest rates.

By the time interest rates started their inevitable ascent up the other side of the cycle, many had already committed the last remaining cents of disposable income to repayments on a further advance on their bond used to buy something shiny and exciting.

Of course when the interest rates go up, so do bond and car payments, credit card and overdraft interest charges. An already stretched budget could snap (with a load twang!) whilst trying to make ends meet.

If you find yourself breaking into a cold sweat each time you get the bills each month, you may want to consider taking some positive action.

First of all - draw up a budget. In detail. Taking stock of exactly where you are is the first step to solving any problem.You should should know exactly what your income is, what your expenses are, your outsanding debt, the interest rates and the number of payments remaining.

Most of the time, just doing that triggers your natural creativity - and common sense - into figuring out a way to address the problem. Whatever you come up with, write a written plan and make sure the steps ofthat plan end up in your diary for execution, or you will have simply done an admin workout.

So many people don't seem to know quite where to start - so they dont. Some hope that ignoring the situation will force it to go away. But they just end up with sand in their ears.

With this national crisis in mind, I am considering putting a workshop/seminar together to guide and equip you in the area of personal budgeting. It would cover skills like budgeting, understanding the various debt instruments available to you, managing debt, eliminating debt, getting the most from a homeloan as well as other useful topics.It would provide tools and templates to assist with each technique shared.
Before I invest time and effort putting the material together, I need to know if you would value a seminar like this one.

Please mail me and tell me if you'd consider attending a seminar of about 3 hours duration (presented on an evening or Saturday) covering this topic and what you think you would be prepared to pay for it assuming you would be provided with notes, templates and possibly computer based tools to help you use the material. If you have any ideas as to what would be important to include in the material, I'd like to know. If you are a manager in a business, would you consider sending your staff on such a seminar.