Managing your personal finances always begins with you. By not completing certain essential tasks, you risk making costly mistakes and placing your financial independence, control and security at risk. The benefits of completing these financial tasks typically include protecting and growing your investments, cutting your tax bill, jump starting your retirement savings, improving your credit rating and reducing your insurance costs.

“The end of year is not only optimal time to address all personal finances, but also is deadline for completing some specific tasks,” says Scott Frush, president of Frush Financial Group and author of 33 Essential Year-End Financial Tasks (available at www.FinancialBooklets.com). “For example, last trading day in December is final opportunity to sell losing investments and offset resulting capital losses against existing capital gains for that tax year.”

Here Frush shares seven of essential year-end financial tasks revealed in his new booklet.

No where is this more true than with financial issues.

Have you ever borrowed money, or charged up VISA card at Christmas, all while telling yourself that you would pay everything off with a coming tax refund or bonus?

Sound familiar. And then what happens when bonus money arrives?

Let me guess….circumstances changed, car needed brakes (or kids needed braces, etc), and VISA debt and interest charges keeps piling up.

Unless you have a plan, you will always be caught in unpredictable grip of “changing circumstances.”

This is a slippery slope that can very quickly can become serious financial stress. Consider fact that Americans are declaring bankruptcy at record rates. One in every 100 families is affected by a bankruptcy.

I was on this slope 10 years ago. Declaring personal bankruptcy and filing for divorce went hand in hand.

One of most insiteful moments of process was preparing a written log for trustee of all of our spending for 5 years leading up to bankruptcy.

While all of individual decisions made sense in moments that they were made, they looked totally foolish in context of “bigger picture”

In other words, constantly changing circumstances drove us off our financial roadmap.

Consider this five step plan for getting on, and staying with, your financial roadmap.