Take This Lesson from Businesses And Apply It To Your Personal Finances

No matter how good or bad Q1 was for your finances this one tip from how businesses run their finance functions will save your year

April 06, 2025

Dear fellow financial freedom seeker, 

Q1 has just ended. Q2 has begun. Time really does fly!

How were your personal finances in Q1? Did you hit all your goals? Or did you fall off the cliff like the stock market? 

No matter how good or bad Q1 was for your personal finances this one tip from how businesses run their finance functions will save your year. 

Your One Simple Step this week is to 

Review your budget and reforecast for the rest of the year 

Every quarter businesses look at their year to date (YTD) numbers and compare them to their budget to see how on track they are for their financial goals. 

They then make adjustments to their budget for the rest of the year to try to get back on track with their goals. This is called a reforecast. It’s where you take your YTD actuals and add them to a new forecast for the rest of the year to get a new forecast for how your whole year will look. 

You can do this for your personal budget too. 

  1. Compare your YTD actuals to your budget. 

    Is your income more or less? Which expenses are more or less? 

  2. Use any differences to make changes to the remaining months in the year

    How are you going to get your income to where you want it to be? Can you ask for a raise? Can you sell some belongings? How are you going to save on your costs? Can you renegotiate contracts like insurance of internet? 

  3. Take your new forecast for the rest of the year and add it to your actuals 

    This gives you what your reforecast (i.e your new budget) looks like for the year. This is now what you’re tracking against for the rest of the year (or this quarter until you repeat this exercise at the start of Q3)

Once you have done this a few times the process becomes intuitive. 

But I appreciate you might never have done this before. 

That is why I am doing something I have never done before. 

I am going to do a one hour group call with 5 of you where I will show you how to review and reforecast your budgets after Q1. I’ll also answer any budgeting related questions you have. All for FREE!

Reply to this email if you would like to be in this call - spots will go on a first come first served basis. 

Til next week, 

Pernia | Your Finance Travel Buddy