Net worths, financial snapshots, personal financial statements – they’re all pretty much the same. They tell you WHERE your money is, and give you an overall status on your finances. I’ve done a variety of these on this site before, but this last one I just filled out rocked.

The wife is in the middle of getting her security clearance (hmm, should I be telling you this?), and one of the billion of papers she had to fill out was a nice and shiny Personal Financial Statement. When I first heard that I was like Aw yeah!! Mrs. BudgetsAreSexy’s gonna have to dig into our finances! Which would have been a riot since she a) HATES doing anything associated with money, and b) would have had to research for hours had it not been for someone diligently tracking it for the last 2 years ;)

Needless to say, she gave it to me to do. And I merrily filled it out! Who am I to turn down such a beautiful lady? Or the chance to work on my financials in a new cool way? So I pulled out my financial snapshot, got my net worth breakdowns in hand, and off I went copying & pasting and taking care of my household duty! It was all rather exciting. And easy since I had all the numbers there in front of me – although I did have to tweak and edit a bit to fit in w/ their categories over mine.

But what was ALSO cool about this statement, was that it had you break down everything by MONTH to get at your disposable income! Which if you recall from last week, was the same importance I was stressing when looking at your budget – finding that number you have left at the end of every month. So it looks like the U.S. Gov’t and I actually have something in common ;) (why they don’t apply it to their OWN budget is beyond me.)

The point of all this is to get ya thinking about the entirety of your finances, and seeing how it all ultimately comes together. Focusing on savings and cutting debt are important parts of the puzzle, but the overall snapshot of your finances is KEY in determining growth. If you’ve never created one, knock one out today! You shouldn’t keep it a secret from yourself…

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PS: Here’s the very same personal financial statement I just filled out, and then the clean template for YOU to try out. If you don’t have a lot of time right now, plug in estimates and come back to it later :) Then save and print so you can compare again in 6 months!