Financial planning is the process of making use of your available resources to achieve your personal and family goals. The purpose of financial planning is to help you use your resources more wisely. Financial planning will help you determine where you are personally and financially, where you want to be, and how you will get to where you want to go.

While financial planning may not help you make more money (although it likely will), it will help you in your stewardship and accountability areas, in helping you become a better steward over the things you have been blessed with and to make better choices.

Financial planning is not easy. Some are uncomfortable discussing financial matters and will need help to overcome this barrier. As you work through these sections, you will learn how to get beyond this fear of finance. Motivation and time is required to complete an accurate financial plan and to accomplish the many things you must do each day in regard to personal finance. Good record keeping is also necessary both before and during the planning period. This website has both motivational and other tools to help with record keeping so that you can become more financially self-reliant.

As a result of financial planning and this course you can accomplish many things:

Manage the unplanned

Accumulate wealth for special purposes

Save for retirement

Protect your assets

Invest intelligently

Minimize your payments to Uncle Sam

Your ultimate goal is to become better, more financially self-reliant, and more Christ-like stewards over the things we are responsible for, and to be able to help others do the same. President Ezra Taft Benson counseled:

Plan for your financial future. As you move through life toward retirement and the decades which follow, we invite all . . . to plan frugally for the years following full-time employment. Be even more cautious . . . about “get-rich” schemes, mortgaging homes, or investing in uncertain ventures. Proceed cautiously so that the planning of a lifetime is not disrupted by one or a series of poor financial decisions. Plan your financial future early; then follow the plan (Ezra Taft Benson, “To the Elderly in the Church,” Ensign, Nov. 1989, 4).