Your Starting Point
 The first step you must take is thinking about the prospects. Any plan of maximizing your wealth will principally concentrate on the future, you can't entirely ignore your financial past. Even if you don't need to make main adjustments in how you manage your personal finances, you'll need to have an exact depiction of the present state of your finances, if for no other reason than to measure how much more money you will need to gain your various financial objectives.
To assess everything you are having at the moment we recommend to follow this three-step process:
• Inventorying your assets and liabilities
• Developing your budget
• Gathering important papers
Inventorying Your Assets and Liabilities
The first stage in the process of assessing what assets and liabilities you now have is to list them.
Your asset inventory will register the major assets you have, their value, and what profit (if any) they bring. While personal items such as clothes and furniture will be listed - or at least joined together in a "personal items" entry - the main emphasis of this list is laid on your investments, including assets that you hold and their price value (such as real estate or collectible coins or stamps) and/or the ones that make a profit (such as bonds, stocks, certificates of deposit, or rental real estate).
Listing your assets. Because you'll use the data from the asset inventory to evaluate and possibly realign your investment strategies, you'll want the entries for your investments to be detailed. You'll want to include an entry recording when each investment was made, its price, market value, and the amount of yearly income that it makes. If you’re married, you should also pay attention to whether each asset is owned by you alone, or mutually with your spouse. You can also list assets owned exclusively by your spouse to get a full image of your family's financial situation.
Listing your liabilities. Your liability list of should include a short description of each liability, including:
• to whom you owe the debt
• when you got into debt
• the interest you should pay on the debt
• the sum of the unpaid debt balance
• the sum of each repayment and the frequency of repayments (for example, monthly/yearly)
• whether the debt is secured, list the security (for example, your car or house)
• the date when you plan to pay the debt off
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