About 2 months back, my wife evaluated our family cash flow and found that we spent more than our expectation on holidays expense. Based on that finding we try to check and recheck for all our expense and budget for holiday, and after 2 months, I can say proudly that we have been saved US$150/month (that big money for Indonesian family) … good job mom

Holiday, whether it just regular weekend or an occasional holiday would always be most awaiting time for a family. Especially for working parents with children where quantity of time together is less, so holiday would be best time to give more quality time, and what is easiest thing family could do to have a “quality time” ? I bet you, answer would be going somewhere and have fun there. True, that will bring quality time, but some cash also will be spent for that, and unfortunately … these expenses mostly are not budgeted yet, and if we do it every weekend so we would do unbudgeted spending about 4 or 5 times in a month, and trust me that could be disaster for our family in the future.

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I started on stock and forex trading about 3 years back, and frankly speaking I wasn’t good on these things at that time. However, I am not a quitter, I know if I did it right I would make some profit, so I keep learning and learning, well it took sometime until then I able to did my first withdrawal and it was so excited. If only I gave up by that time when I thinked that I wasn’t good, surely this exciting feeling won’t even come to my mind. Now, I can smile happy every month with at least 8% – 25% of my capital banked to my account.

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Few weeks back I wrote about importance of defining our financial target, so we can plan our investment (how much, how long, and what instrument) to achieve that target. This time we will discuss a very crucial thing that we need to put as our number one financial target, preparing our emergency fund.

Emergency fund will be required for any unexpected thing that may happen to us, for instance if we, for some reason would become jobless, when we need to pay some urgent unplanned bill like medical supposed we don’t have insurance or bill more than limit that we could claim. All of those require emergency fund, therefore, due to its function, emergency fund should be liquid enough for us to credit it whenever and wherever we would need it.

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Investing is like an insurance, we have to own it when we don’t need it but it could be late to be bought when we would need it. So it is wise to start investing as soon as possible, but before we go further on all investing related matter, it is also good to know what goal we want to be achieved with our investment. Goal is what we called as financial target.

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