Take Control of Your Financial Future During National Financial Literacy Month

April is often associated with spring cleaning and reorganizing, which means you finally made the time go through that overflowing junk drawer or to organize last year’s financial statements for the tax filing deadline. But when it comes to your finances, you can use this time to do more than just file your tax return documents thanks to the resources provided as part of National Financial Literacy Month.

Financial literacy simply means that you have the knowledge necessary to make informed and positive decisions about handling your money. The concept is especially important for small business owners, who often have significant overlap between their business and personal finances.

If you’re not sure about your financial literacy level, you can start with this simple questionnaire from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that will give you a financial well-being score. You can also explore MyMoney.gov, a website designed to cover the basic building blocks of managing your personal finances.

Once you have a baseline, the U.S. Small Business Administration offers a host of resources to help you get your business “fiscally fit.” Specifically, the SBA created Money Smart for Small Business, which has 13 different modules on topics like financial management, record keeping, tax reporting and succession planning. You can also use the tools available on Venturize to take the next step in business and financial planning. Our Resources page offers many tools and guides on credit, understanding collateral and planning for business growth.

It’s important to know that there’s more to financial literacy than just monitoring your monthly finances. Full financial literacy means you are confident and secure in your long-term planning, knowing that an unforeseen health crisis won’t set you back and that you’ll one day be able to retire. Small Business Majority offers a number of resources to navigate these tricky financial topics as part of our Entrepreneurship Program. Through this program, we offer many local and national events on access to capital, retirement and wealth building for entrepreneurs. We also partner with a number of national and local organizations that offer a wide range of assistance to small businesses like Nav.com, the only organization that makes it easy to monitor your personal and business credit score in the same place.

Taking control of your finances can feel like a daunting task, especially for a small business owner who has both personal and businesses finances to worry about. Luckily, there are many resources out there to help you break down the steps to achieving financial literacy.

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