Financial planning is about making your money work for you. Financial planning is NOT about products, or investments, or even deprivation. It’s not about feeling that you need to “do” something (like you need to do the laundry, or grocery shop, or change the sheets); instead, it’s about getting urgent about your results with money.
That urgency comes from absolutely knowing what it’s going to take to create your ideal life. It’s about giving yourself permission to expect more from your money. That doesn’t mean you need to invest hours and hours figuring this stuff out, it means that you get to change the way you think about your money and what’s important to you. And in fact, what’s important is probably none of the things you’ve been told are important to a successful financial life.
When you have clarity, it opens a world of possibility for you—it might be changing what you’re doing, or it might be that everything you’re doing is awesome and you can relax. You can have more peace of mind. Click To TweetWhat IS important? I’ve got four things you absolutely must do to expect more from your money (and thereby GET MORE from your money). Because by changing what you expect from your money, by letting go of your traditional expectations, you change everything.
Rule #1 – Ground yourself in possibility, not fear
For many people, everything to do with money comes from a place of fear and survival. If that’s you, and you are ready to expect more from your money, then we need to flip that dynamic. So, let’s say that you hate-hate-hate thinking about how you spend money. Or the idea of someone else knowing how you spend your money makes you cringe.
Guess what you need to start doing? You need to get more comfortable with looking at the data. I had a client who resisted this SO MUCH…and all I was asking for was about 15 minutes or so per week. Not much. Finally, I just asked her to log in to Mint every day—don’t even look at it, just log in. That was finally a small enough step that she could deal with it, and it ended up changing everything for her.
When you have clarity, it opens a world of possibility for you—it might be changing what you’re doing, or it might be that everything you’re doing is awesome and you can relax. You can have more peace of mind.
A huge piece of expecting more from your money is developing your own philosophical framework to filter the data. What spending gives you the most satisfaction and what causes the most resentment? Those are your values at play, and you need to start rearranging things to reflect them. And the symptoms of fear—judgment, guilt, grudge—have no place in this process.
What can you add to your life to help make money less fearful for you? What areas of finance are scary versus easy?
We’ll move onto Rule #2 next week, but in the meantime, I KNOW that financial planning makes your money more accessible and gives you clarity over all of the areas. You can schedule a consult call or take this quiz to see which financial plan is right for you (it’s fun!).