I was in a savings, investment and personal finance Google meet up with a group of doctors and we were trying to breakdown the fundamentals pertaining investment, personal finance and making your money work for you. This is a movement one doctor is starting for her colleagues. To invite finance and investment experts who will break down different aspects of finance and investment. After which a task is assigned. Some of the questions that popped up were: Assuming you were now starting life as a salary earner, what's the first thing to do to get your personal finance in check? My response: the first thing to do is create a self awareness checklist, reflect on your spending habit, reflect on your savings habit, draw out the pattern. Now from that you can now create a template to start tracking your habit and eventually budget. The template should include emotional triggers that drive your purchases, the tracking should including where you money goes the most, the tracking should include whether you are spending within your means or you are borrowing to spend. As part of the template indicate recurring expenditure versus lump sum expenditure. It should include whether you are buying things in bulk or buying them bit by bit. For instance a heavy data user shouldn't be buying bundle as and when it's exhausted you can buy in bulk. The last time I was doing the calculation with a nephew and he realized that the "supi supi" data bundle he bought is rather more costly as compared to the 218gigabyte data which costs 399 cedis. For me I bundle twice a year because I always subscribe to the 399 cedis package. I also added that you need to work towards saving first before you spend not the other way round. And there are tools that automate the savings. And with savings it helps to dedicate a certain percentage that you can stick to so that when your income increases that percentage remains the same. So you can track with a budgeting app or you can track with your personalized template One budgeting app that works is Budget Goal. Another question that was asked is that, is treasury bill the only way to save your money? Treasury bill rate is okay. 3 months rates currently hovers around 5%, and the 1 year rate hovers around 10% but you can also beat inflation by investing your saved capital in a mutual fund. And the good thing is that you can also invest or save on a monthly basis. If you are saving towards a big purchase like land you can look at unlocking the reward potential in mutual funds. And we have different types of mutual funds, equity funds, balanced funds, and money money funds . The thing about mutual funds is that the fund managers do the hard work for you by ensuring proper risk management on your money. But making sure they balance the portfolio and by making sure they select the right instruments. The principle is that if you are trying to create saving towards a short term goal, then treasury bills work perfectly but if it's a long term between 3 and 5 years or more you can look at index funds, mutual funds and exchange traded funds. There were other specific scenarios given like "if one earns 3000 cedis how much should one save? Since this scenario can be approached differently on different context I leave you guys to break it down based on different contexts. I will be reading the comments.