Managing Your Money

Lesson 4: Get Sunglasses: Your Financial Future Can be Bright

Planning Your Financial Future

My inability to manage my money mirrored my inability to plan my life. Planning for my future was like reading Braille. I went to college and earned a graduate degree but I had never really planned my career path. In times when I was making less than $20,000 and in times when I was nearly making six figures, I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow. We need to think about what we want in the future, otherwise we will waste all our tomorrows.

I wasn’t committed to my future and I wasn’t focused on where I wanted to be. As a result, I always thought about purchasing a house, but I never had enough for a down payment. Here is the problem: I thought about my finances but I didn’t “do” anything about my finances. There is a biblical story which uses ants to prove the point that even the smallest creatures in the earth need to plan for their future.

Ok, so you made it this far. We are in the middle of Lesson 4. You know more than you ever thought you would about me. I have enjoyed every minute of it. Even as I sit here typing while listening to my John Mayer cd, I am thinking about those who will look at my extreme stories and say “wow that happened to me too.” Others may say “wow I’m glad that never happened to me,” but I’m ok with either response.

That makes all of this soul baring tolerable. Now that we are in the homestretch we’ll spend time thinking about ways to change how we think about our finances and work on improving our financial self esteem.

If you want nice grass in your front yard you have to water it, give it fertilizer and cut it on a regular basis. Do what is best for the shareholders and customers in your life i.e. your family.

So let’s talk about planning for financial success. Now this is not the part of the lesson where I tell you about blue chip stocks. Here I want to give you some tips that I have learned. Here is an analogy straight from my life. If I want to be prouder of my silhouette, I have to stop eating bagels for breakfast and burritos for lunch everyday. The decision is mine and I can make the right decision every day when I say no to what I want and go for what I need and what will make me look better when I look sideways in the mirror. You can do it. Don’t think about next week, think about today what can you do every day when you wake up to make things different.

Start out with some of the tips Paul Lim discusses in his book "Money Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make". Lim recommends “automating aspects of your financial life.” This would mean developing systems in your life that will help you to create new habits. For example, if you have the ability to pay your bills online, then maybe sitting down on a certain day each week to pay bills will work for you because you build that habit into your life. Another example might be if you decided to have your bank withdraw $20-50 dollars out of each paycheck and deposit it into your savings account. Again, this automates aspects of your life and allows you to save money rather painlessly

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