Good bye January hello February, yes that’s right people 2019 is well under way, one month down 11 more beautiful opportunities to come. It may seem like i have been rather quite, but actually i have just been living out my personal lifestyle financial plan.
Last year for the first time i undertook to do my own personal lifestyle financial planning, terrible i know(9 years in the profession and only now), but like many of you i figured i had it all under control, money was coming in, and money was going out, i was doing the things i thought were important and everything seemed to be working out. But i started to feel a little like a fraud, i was advising my clients on how to plan and prioritise their life and aspirations, and i wasn’t really doing it myself. In my mind the inflows where always more than the outflows, and so that meant things were going to be ok.WELL I WAS WRONG.
By having the “plan” in my head, it meant i could shift the goalposts when ever i wanted, based on whatever the circumstances where.That meant, i never became accountable for the things i wanted to achieve, and more importantly i was able to make excuses for the things i failed at achieving, and because i made excuses, it was like i never actually failed at them, and so the spiral continued. Looking back, it’s human nature i guess, if we don’t commit to our goals, and then we don’t achieve them, well its not entirely failure is it? If no one else knows what our goals are, if we miss them it’s not failure is it? We aren’t letting anybody else down? I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was letting myself down time and time again, and making excuses to myself, but because the outside world didn’t know about it, it seemed fine,the thing is, deep down we are our own biggest critic, and if you constantly treat yourself like a failure, you will start to feel, act and live life as a failure.
After accounting for and understanding my current financial lifestyle and habits, it helped me realise what is important to me, and it helped me identify how much is enough, how much money do i really need to live the life my family and i wanted to live now and into the future, did my life need to center around making more money, or did i need to just earn enough to enable me to spend more time with my wife and son?
I was able to paint my perfect life and identify what needed to happen to make sure i can live it. Everything is in the plan,it has to be, its my blueprint, there is no hiding now, i have built my ideal life,and i have identified what i need to do to live that life, it’s actually really refreshing. Having my plan in place, having it down on paper, it makes me accountable for the things i do everyday. Whenever i do something, i think to myself, is this working towards my plan, or is it working against my plan, everything i do has a trade off,if my actions aren’t working towards my plan, they are working against it and because my plan is not just in my head, i am letting down more than just myself, i’m letting my family down.
Having gone through the entire process, as would my clients, has really opened up my eyes and given my life a clear direction. I have dreamt and built my perfect life,and it is so vividly clear in my mind, that i can almost touch it, it ticks every box and covers all the bases, and it really EXCITES me.I know having the plan is one thing, and now the real work starts in bringing it to life.This has enabled me to get laser focused on how i want to live my life and run my business.The knock on effect of getting MY life in order is becoming more and more clear everyday, it reminds me of the saying success breeds success, i’m not being naive by saying this but rather, that because there is an overarching plan in place, the little things too start falling into place, which then frees up time and direction for the bigger things to fall into place and so it continues, much like a cascading waterfall.
