Your Personal Money Rules — Worksheet

Create your own financial playbook for spending, saving, debt, investing, and building long-term wealth.

Most people make money decisions one transaction at a time. That makes it easy for emotions, lifestyle pressure, impulse purchases, and short-term thinking to take over.

Your Personal Money Rules helps you decide in advance how you want to handle the financial situations that come up again and again.

Inside, you’ll create practical rules for:

• Spending — Set boundaries that protect your cash flow
• Big Purchases — Create waiting periods and decision rules
• Lifestyle Inflation — Decide what happens when your income increases
• Saving — Build consistent saving habits
• Emergency Funds — Define when your cash reserve should be used
• Debt — Create rules for borrowing and paying down balances
• Credit — Establish smarter borrowing habits
• Investing — Build rules around consistency, diversification, and long-term thinking
• Market Volatility — Decide how you will respond when markets move sharply
• Fees & Recurring Costs — Identify financial friction worth reviewing
• Taxes — Create habits for tax-aware financial decisions
• Financial Protection — Build rules around cash reserves, insurance, and account security
• Family & Lifestyle — Create shared rules for major financial decisions
• Money Goals — Connect your rules to the goals you actually care about
• If–Then Rules — Prepare for predictable financial situations before they happen
• 20 Personal Money Rules — Write your own financial playbook
• Monthly & Quarterly Reviews — Keep your rules relevant as your life changes

You don't need more financial information. You need clear rules for what you'll do with the information you already have.

Write the rules once. Use them when the decision actually arrives.

For educational purposes only. This worksheet is not individualized financial, investment, tax, credit, accounting, or legal advice.