National Financial Awareness Day
What is National Financial Awareness Day?
National Financial Awareness Day is dedicated to promoting the importance of financial literacy. Celebrated every year on August 14th, it encourages individuals to improve their financial health through better budgeting, saving, investing, and debt management practices.
6 Ways to Celebrate National Financial Awareness Day
1. Create and Review a Budget: Budgeting is one of the most important financial tools in managing your finances. Take time to sit down and create a budget or review and adjust your existing one to better track and manage your income, expenses, and savings.
Follow these four steps to create a budget:
1. Track Your Income and Expenses: List all sources of income including salary, investments, and other sources of income, and track all your expenses for a month to gain an understanding of your spending patterns.
2. Categorize Your Expenses: Divide your expenses into categories such as fixed expenses like rent, and variable expenses such as groceries, transportation, and entertainment.
3. Set Spending Limits: Allocate a specific amount of money to each category based on your income and financial goals. Ensure that you prioritize essential expenses like housing, as well as savings.
4. Monitor and Adjust: Set time to regularly review your budget, compare your actual spending to your budgeted spending, make adjustments as needed to stay on track, and also remember to save money.
2. Set Financial Goals: Define short-term and long-term financial goals such as saving for a vacation, paying off debt, your future like a wedding, house, or kids, or planning for retirement. At IAA Credit Union, we offer a variety of ways to save such as:
- Christmas Club: Put a little away each paycheck throughout the year to make the holidays more financially manageable.
- Vacation Club: Save a little each paycheck for your big summer plans.
- Money Market: Earn higher interest rates with higher balances while having access to your money.
- Share Certificates (CDs): Put your money away and watch it grow with flexible maturities.
- Premier Savings: Earn a high rate on balances up to $20,000 while having easy access to your funds.
3. Educate Yourself and Your Family: Read a book, watch a documentary or video online, take an online course about personal finance, and more to improve your financial literacy. If you have kids, take them along on this journey with you as it is important to start teaching them about financial literacy at a young age. IAA Credit Union partners with Greenlight, the debit card and money app for kids and teens. Parents can set flexible controls, send money instantly, and get real-time spending notifications, Kids and teens can monitor their balances, set their own goals, and learn to manage their money.
4. Work on Your Credit: Credit health plays a big role in your financial well-being. A good credit score opens the door to better interest rates, loan options, and other financial opportunities. At IAA Credit Union, we offer our members access to My Credit Score to help them stay on top of their credit scores. View your score, get full credit reports, receive monitoring alerts, and simulate how certain scenarios would impact your score - all without affecting your credit score!
5. Automate Savings: Set up automatic transfers to your savings account to ensure you consistently save a portion of your income. This helps take the thought out of having to remember to put money towards your savings yourself.
6. Ask For Help: A way to increase your financial literacy is by asking for help. Schedule a consultation with a financial advisor to get personalized advice and strategies for improving your financial health. IAA Credit Union patterns with GreenPath Financial Wellness - a free money management and financial education service provider to our members.
