While we cannot avoid the unavoidable, we can do a good job of planning for everything else. Technology has helped us greatly here, with many excellent software applications available can give your financial efforts some discipline and focus. Using such software means that you are able to better prepare yourself for life’s financial ups and downs. One such resource can be found at: http://www.mint.com.

If the prospect of managing your affairs financially fills you with fear, it is worth remembering that the plans to manage money are usually very simple, and that it is sticking to such plans that brings difficulty.

Ramit Sethi recently authored a book that will help you along the road to thinking about your financial affairs in a more balanced and objective way. The approach he looks at in a section of I will Teach You to be Rich is called a First Step Cash Management System. Go here to read a great article on how this system works.

The First Step Cash Management System is concerned with the true management of cash, rather than the more passive approach that some of us might take. The aim here is to encourage us to view cash management as a simple but vital part of what we do.

In the section Sethi proposes that we have three ‘buckets’ in our financial system:

• The first bucket is called the staticbucket. It is in this one that we manage all of our everyday, regular daily outgoings. We cannot avoid them, so the expenditure is ‘static’. 

• The dynamic bucket focuses on medium to long term spending that comes up every now and then.
  

• Finally, the control bucket contains everything left over.
  

Using the bucket idea, one can inject money into appropriate areas, and thus manage the budget more effectively. This kind of organisation is simple and practical, and allows you to step back and see your cash flow for what it is really is, a process. But its greatest value in terms of peace of mind is that it also allows you to manage those unexpected bills and help you to start planning for specific goals.