--- title: Do It Yourself Financial Plans | TIME description: Financial expert Jill Schlesinger walks you through the steps to create your own financial plan. canonical: https://time.com/video/n1ZvR5Zh/ og:title: Do It Yourself Financial Plans og:description: Financial expert Jill Schlesinger walks you through the steps to create your own financial plan. og:url: https://time.com/video/n1ZvR5Zh/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/n1ZvR5Zh/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Do It Yourself Financial Plans twitter:description: Financial expert Jill Schlesinger walks you through the steps to create your own financial plan. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/n1ZvR5Zh/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Do It Yourself Financial Plans > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Do It Yourself Financial Plans [Watch (HLS stream): Do It Yourself Financial Plans](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/n1ZvR5Zh.m3u8) (2:35)  _Published 2016-10-04. Financial expert Jill Schlesinger walks you through the steps to create your own financial plan._ --- Jul 27, 2023 8:54 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Tips on How to Financially Support Your Adult Children](/video/3zSyglL7/) ### Tips on How to Financially Support Your Adult Children [Year-End Financial Advice](/video/5GK0eMto/) ### Year-End Financial Advice [Year-End Tax Tips with Jill Schlesinger](/video/IqlBe550/) ### Year-End Tax Tips with Jill Schlesinger --- ## Transcript We've got Jill Schlesinger here, financial expert to help you put together a do it yourself financial plan. Jill, thank you. Great to be with you. So you say that there is one thing you have to do before you get Started. Yes. What's that? This is track your expenses. Now maybe you're using mint. com or another app and it's really easy but a lot of people literally cannot begin the planning process until they figure out what's coming in, more importantly what's going out for 90 days, that's it. Mm- hm. Just figure out where you're spending money. You know where your fixed expenses are, right? You know whether you're paying rent or a mortgage But it's the variable expenses that we're really keeping an eye on. And this is not that segment where I say stop drinking coffee so you can send your kids to college, because that won't work either, but we're trying to figure out how much money is available to fund your future goals. That's why tracking is important. Okay, now we know you have to build up an emergency fund, you have to pay down that What's next? Well, I think retirement is the easiest category, and here's where you've got a ton of resources online, a lot of calculators out there. The tricky part about a retirement estimate, and why a lot of people kind of stop at the do- it- yourself part of it, is it requires you to make some guesses. You say, here's how much I saved already, here's what I'm saving, the level I'm saving at. Now it gonna say what inflation rate do you wanna use. Then you stop and you say, I don't know. And so I'll tell that although inflation is running very low right now, 1 % annually we're looking into the future decades and to the future. So why do we use 3 %, that's a very conservative number. And finally, my favorite question they ask when are you going to die? Now if I knew when you were gonna die, I could build a great financial plan, but since we don't know that, if you are under the age of 50, you wanna use 95. If you are actually over the age of 50, maybe 90 and again, you can adjust that based on really what the health is of you and your family, just look at your history. And then a tool will just calculate out what you should be saving, what it'll tell you? And it will tell you this big huge number but each tool break it down and say, here's how much money you need to be saving every single month. Now that goes back to the expense part, right? Because you say I need to find another 200 bucks a month, so I hit my Retirement goals, you might look at that expense and say, hm, why don't I take some cheaper vacations in the future. Why don't I cut something out? This is really where you need to take your temperature about what you want to be able to do and the priorities that you wanna build. So thank you so much. It's great advice. 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