1.Situation

In MYPRODUCT2 I detailed how I became the financial node in Graffiti / BBDO advertising agency with the responsibility to develop hundreds of costs and budgets for Cosmorom’s projects.

The responsibility for making costs forced me to learn all the details of the projects and to imagine working formats that make the financial understanding on these projects as easy as possible.

That’s how I started to develop my budgeting skills, a process that has strengthened throughout my entire professional life.

2.Task

Budgeting skills are used intensively and almost exclusively in the professional area. But are there situations in which you will use these abilities in your personal projects too?

3.Action

In my case the answer is yes.

In 2016 after we purchased a long-sought property, we started a process of complete renovation for this property.

Because we had no time pressure, we decided to model the property according to our desires, working with a designer who gave the house a new perspective and who supervised the whole process of change.

The renovation process was ample. On one hand we intervened in the all areas of the house: masonry, electrical part, heating, pipes, plumbing, windows, stairs etc. On the other hand everything that means furniture, decorations, home appliances were new acquisitions.

4.Results

As a consequence, the financial perspective involved a real challenge, keeping costs under control represented for me a permanent scope during the renovation process.

So before the working process started, I drafted a project budget, document xsl with nearly 200 lines listing all the activities, operations that were supposed to be carried out during the renovation.

You may find below this document below.

For each line, project activity I researched and estimated the cost. So when we started the renovation I already had a view regarding the cost of the project.

During the entire renovation period of about 8 months, I kept, completed and permanently reviewed this document, the costs being always under control.

And when your personal project involves a 5-digit euro budget, cost control is required to avoid unpleasant surprises at the end.

5.Key Learnings

Financial education and management must be present in your personal projects not only in professional ones.

Although it seems surprising, I know real cases in which personal financial decisions were taken without the rigor and analysis that would normally have been applied by those people in the situation where they would have carried out the project at work.

Avoid this kind of situations and use budgeting abilities in personal initiatives too. For example when you are thinking to take a credit, you should not only look at the rate level but also I should calculate how many times you will pay the good purchased versus its current or estimated future market value.

Notification: MYPRODUCT reflects my real professional experience and expertise as well as my subjectivity. I do have a profound respect for all the companies I collaborated to and for all the people I worked with. It is not my intention to approach any sensitive, confidential or offending information related to companies, projects or people. If you the reader deduct or recognise companies, projects or people in my examples, I kindly ask you to respect MYPRODUCT and my professional and ethic approach and to not share any detail, information, situation, name, company.