Divorce can be emotionally and financially overwhelming. That's why I'm teaming up with Sunny Wishart, president and founder of A la Carte Financial and a certified financial planner. We will show you how to understand all things money without feeling ashamed, overwhelmed, or embarrassed. You will learn. Learn more. Ask questions. No question is a dumb question. Welcome to Money with Sunny. Let's get into it.
We want to emphasize the importance of financial freedom in achieving your personal fulfillment. We will teach you how to be honest with yourself and wrestle with the challenge of introspection and understanding what it means to thrive. Learn how to connect financial goals, particularly in pre-retirement and retirement stages, to your vision of a thriving life.
In this blog, we're going to talk about the importance of painting your vision, your picture, and your future, thinking about your wish list, your wants, your needs, how your future looks, and how it feels. Being positive about where you want to be and feeling and seeing that. Everything is very correlated to our money. We have to ask ourselves, “What does it look and feel like for you to thrive?” and spend some time thinking about that.
This is unique to everyone. Everyone’s answer to this question is unique, some may thrive on their equestrian farm, some may thrive traveling the world. It requires some internal introspection. Often people don't give themselves the time to ask that question, to think about what's important to them. We get caught up in the ruckus and the day-to-day. While that's normal, giving ourselves a little bit of time to think about what thriving looks like for us, what it feels like is important. You don’t have to spend hours thinking on this question. 10-15 minutes in silence and peace is enough.
Sitting in silence isn’t always easy. We tend to get distracted a few seconds in, maybe we grab our phone and start scrolling and don’t realise when 20 minutes have passed. We’re also constantly thinking about other people’s opinions and thoughts and tend to lose sight of who we are and what’s important to us. But taking the conscious effort to sit in silence and do some introspection is important.
Everything is correlated to money and sometimes people understand a lot of things but are missing financial literacy. So when financial planning, the first step is always understanding what your goals are and you can start with three main goals. This is quite similar to what it looks and feels like to thrive because often times people’s goals are their lifestyle, their kids, traveling or simply just financial freedom. And these have a lot to do with what is going to make you feel like you're thriving as moving forward with these financial goals. It's interesting once you realize how much money is tied into what you want out of your life.
There are studies done, that once you reach a certain amount of income, there's no extra happiness that you're going to get from another dollar. But you do need to have that certain amount to have some level of happiness, to be sustainable, be able to pay your bills, be able to have a little bit of fun. So thriving for some people is just getting to having enough money. That's where Sunny comes in. The conversation today is about creating a plan and figuring out how you can have enough, how you can manage month to month, year to year and even have a 10 year plan.
It is also interesting to see how a lot of times men and women have very different confidence levels when it comes to money. Stereotypically it is cultural, societal, but men, often, are more confident when it comes to their money than women are. Women tend to approach the topic of money out of worry asking “are we okay?”, while men know they’re okay and are often looking for a financial plan that will help them optimise their finances.
In any area of life, confidence is important. And the confidence to DO things is even more important. Instead of worrying about something, trying to figure out how to fix it and taking action is more helpful. Doing means learning, gathering information, understanding your current situation, your numbers, figuring things out. Yes it will be difficult at first, but you can do it. As you start overcoming challenges one by one, you start gaining the confidence through a positive feedback loop that also creates self-discovery. You are less confident when you don't do it because you just don't know if you can and you haven't tried it.
Understanding financials doesn’t have to be overwhelming and confusing. Sometimes people get themselves all tied in knots with too many bank accounts, and too many credit cards, and the money is just shifting around and no one knows what's going on. It's too much of a mental load. You're busy doing everything else involved with running life in a house. And shuffling that money around is a nightmare and it's too much. So you don't do. So you need to start with doing things and this is literally just understanding the ins and outs of your financials. That's it. Keep an eye on ho wmuch money is coming in and how much money is going out and where it is going to.
So the bottom line is, if you want to create a financial future that is free and stable and feels good for you, then the first step is getting organized. Know where your money is, look at the past three months of your credit cards, identify if your money is going somewhere that you aren’t actively using, and create a plan. And within that plan, consider what is most important to you, what do you want? What is thriving to you?
This goes back to coming up with three main goals. When thinking about your three main goals, think about things like pre-retirement goals, retirement goals. Or goals related to your house, maybe purchasing a home, renovating your home, downsizing, etc. Travel is huge too. Think about what is important to you and what will make you happy. It is important to account for everything from the start. Even if travel is not your biggest goal but you occasionally love a little trip, make sure to account for it right from the startl. Put a realistic price tag on your wants and desires. So don't diminish your goals because that can also wreck your plans. If you don’t account for these things from the beginning, you might end up in a situation where you need more than what you would’ve needed if you would have accounted for it right at the start. Now you have to do your financial planning all over again.
So be honest with yourself. What do you want? And once you kind of figure that out, well, then you can create a plan to get there and you can envision your future and you can manifest things in your life. And as you start to envision your future, opportunities will come on their own.
So a few key takeaways from this blog are:
Dream big and don’t diminish your dreams
Set three main goals
Give yourself some space and time to reflect on what you want and answer the question “What does it look and feel like to thrive?”.
Do the work instead of worrying.
I hope this has helped. I want to let you know that you can do this. You're not alone. You are perfect just the way that you are. You are worthy of love. You are important. And until next time. Have a great rest of your week.
Wendy
xoxo
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