“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”
— Alexander Graham Bell
“The Five P’s of Money Management” is a system that shows you how
to improve your financial life—and, by extension, your overall life. It has five main parts, each with actionable worksheets, checklists and illustrations.
Part One: Prioritize Financial Fitness
A guide to documenting a comprehensive financial inventory. Within this part there are two worksheets to fill out:
- Use the MONEY FLOW© worksheet to detail your monthly cash flow— your income and expenses.
- Use the MONEY WORTH© worksheet to record your assets and liabilities—everything you own and everything you owe.
Part Two: Pick a Goal
Helps the learner to analyze the completed financial inventory, and then choose and document the right goal. Based on the numbers previously documented, there are three worksheets:
- MONEY GRADES© shows users how to analyze their current financial situation and assess future financial readiness.
- MONEY RUNGS© provides a hierarchy (ladder) of potential financial goals to choose from, based upon the user’s current finances and priorities.
- MONEY GOAL© is a form used to document the reader’s most pressing goal, using the “S.M.A.R.T.” criteria.
Part Three: Prepare the Plan
Explains basic financial literacy. It educates users to prepare for creating a comprehensive financial plan. The three diagrams in this section are:
- MONEY RULES©, which is a list of 10 money rules to live by.
- MONEY CLOCK©, which describes types of available investments.
- MONEY TIMES©, explains appropriate timeframes for different types of investments, based on short-term, intermediate or long-term time periods.
Part Four: Plan for the Future
Guides the learner to create a documented financial plan to organize and structure their savings, spending, risk management and timeframes. These documents encourage the planner to focus on items that they can control.
Part Five: Protect the Plan
Provides an overview of related topics to consider to protect the financial plan. Guidance is provided about hiring a money professional, an introduction to insurance/tax/legal aspects, and a checklist to review finances once a year.