_{GIF Animation - money management Source: Dribbble}

What is Money Management

Money management is a very broad concept that refers to strategies and techniques that someone can use to efficiently use their capital or earnings. This may cover spending, budgeting, and saving/investing. It can be proactive with periodic or regular financial planning. It can also be fine-tuned depending on the market or how you would react to specific events even without advanced planning.

Financial plans for individuals differ widely because of the varying age, lifestyles, and other factors that need to be considered. However, some of the underlying principles can be shared.

Some budget rules can be used by different people to manage their finances/money. For example, there’s a rule where you set aside part of your earnings for 1) essentials, 2) wants, and 3) for saving or investing.

Money management with proper planning helps minimize non-essential spending. If a person can limit their spending to essentials only, this can help them further in the long run.

Money management can be done either through a service like from a bank or insurance; or by using finance applications, there can be paid ones and free ones. With today’s smartphone apps, managing your money can be a lot easier.

_{GIF Animation - budgeting - piggy bank Source: Lrng}

My Money Management Plans

I’m an insurance advisor/broker for Manulife Philippines, so more or less, I try to put into practice what I preach. As an advisor, we help our clients save and/or invest depending on 2 things, their income and what they want to save.

We help them figure out which financial plans will help them reach a certain goal or meet a certain need based on their earnings/savings.

As I’ve mentioned earlier in the article, some budgeting rules can be applied by people in their planning. My principle is to budget our household earning into the essentials, savings, then on the non-essentials.

Our essential spending consists of our monthly bills for utility, food, car’s gas, etc. For the savings part, they’re considered essential as well, we have a few insurance policies that we pay monthly, and we set aside a percentage of our earnings for our emergency funds and savings. Whatever is left can be spent on non-essentials.

Usually, we plan a month or a few months ahead. Calculating what we need per month so that we won’t be short in our budget. If there are deficits, we can take out a loan from our savings or withdraw from it.

In the future, our plan is to get more income so that we can increase the percentage for our savings and investments. I plan to add more diversification to them as well, like putting some money in another bank account or stock investment. I’m also planning to put some money as capital for a small business that can provide additional cash flow.

If we’re lucky to get more than what we calculated, we can then spend that on non-essentials like office stuff improvements and home improvements.

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What is Portfolio Management

Portfolio management is how people or companies manage a pool of capital. Capital is invested in varying asses classes to get ROI. These assets may include government bonds, stocks, real estate, equities, commodities, etc.

Managing your portfolio can be done by yourself or through firms/companies. Firms can offer mutual funds, brokerage, ETFs, retirement, financial planning, and other services that may greatly help your portfolio management.

You will need strategies to properly handle your investments, and these strategies will depend on factors like:

• Risk preference
• Investment philosophies
• Size of fund
• Economic trends
• Geography

Portfolio management can be done either passively or actively.

Passive management is done by investing in mutual funds or ETFs. Active portfolios, on the other hand, are managed by firms with a set strategy.

In managing a portfolio, it is important to balance the risks and returns to maximize your profits.

_{GIF Animation - stocks planning Source: Barrons}

My Portfolio Management Plans

The training I had as a financial/insurance advisor will become a really good source of knowledge in me handling my own portfolio.

On top of that, my enthusiasm in the crypto space could prove useful as well. Just for the fact that I'm writing for the crypto academy, is useful in itself. Just 2 weeks ago I was able to learn more about cryptocurrency trading and using indicators to plan my trades.

My article: Crypto Academy Week 5 Homework Post for @stream4u, The Supertrend Indicator, was written for week 5 of the crypto academy. This study helped me realize the importance of technical analysis in doing trading.

Paring technical analysis with fundamental analysis is a good arsenal for managing portfolios.

When I have more cash flow, I'll be able to put some of those into investments like stocks and cryptocurrencies. Doing trades will help me get more profit if I do it right.

As of the moment, the only portfolios I have are for my insurance policies. Those policies are called VULs, meaning what I put in as premium monthly as invested into funds handled by the insurance company. These funds are collections of stocks that fund managers trade. Actually, I will be able to apply technical analysis on these funds already, I will just have to study the funds better to make sure I don't do badly on my trades.

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My Last Investment Failure

Since the only portfolio I have is under mutual funds and they are for the long term, and I've only been a few years in, I cannot really check if my investment there has failed or succeeded. I guess if there will be failures I would consider it will fall on trying to establish a business of my own.

Putting up your own business should be reliant on money management, because if you do not study it properly - you're bound to fail.

So, in order to grow your money and get big returns on your investment, I suggest research on money and portfolio management and how you can do them properly. This will greatly help especially in cryptocurrencies, since the system is very volatile and very new.

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Conclusion

Money management is an important part of investing, not just in the crypto space. It is a broad concept and portfolio management is just one of the many things that's under this concept.

Studying and planning properly is very crucial when it comes to financial management. It's not something we can take lightly because we might end up trying just to fail.

Gracias!

Thanks to @stream4u for this homework task. Shoutout to @steemitblog, @steemcurator02, and @steemcurator01 for this chance too.

I have enjoyed this learning experience, I'm already looking forward to @stream4u's and all the professor's future tasks. Thanks @deveerei for showing me how to use GIFs.