Money Habits Keeping You Poor

Let’s talk a little bit about money habits that are keeping you poor, or keeping you stuck where you are this kind of thing about habits, good ones, awesome. Bad ones. Not awesome. Also kind of like beliefs, you have wonderful beliefs about yourself and about money and relationships, great. You have limiting beliefs about money, you have limiting beliefs about success, or relationships or your abilities. Not great. Those will 100% keep you stuck, where you are, essentially, a glass ceiling, or a glass box, however you want to think about it. So money habits that are keeping you poor. Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about how habits are what you do, talk about how routines are then how you do things. So those are the relationship or that’s the relationship between those two really, really important things, I bet you understand a little bit about the importance of habit. Good habits can really make life easier. If you have bad habits, it will in fact, keep you stuck, it will keep you poor. So I can see into the future. Tell me what it is you’re doing, how you’re spending your time, how you’re spending your money, how you’re spending your attention, what you’re giving them to. And I can tell you where you’re going to end up five years, 10 years, 20 years. And I speak from absolute experience on this stuff. When it comes to habits around money that keep you poor, I spent better part of my 20s struggling with money even though I was working as a financial professional, made all the mistakes, live paycheck to paycheck, didn’t keep a budget didn’t pay attention to my cash flow, I had credit card debt, waited to the last minute to pay bills. So last thing I’m doing is wagging my finger at you. And coming from some position of perfection where I’ve never made a mistake, the opposite made most of the mistakes, fact, probably all the money mistakes that you can make. Fortunately, I’ve also made a lot of really good mistakes, my 30s. And now into my 40s. I have lots of wonderful money habits, lots of wonderful money routines. But you can look at that across my entire life, I work really hard and diligently to examine what I’m currently doing. And what I want you to do think about, okay, let’s think about what you’re doing. Let’s identify your current habits, your current routines, essentially your current behaviors, and then take them to their logical conclusion. If you keep doing what you’re doing is, is it going to get you what you want? And for me, the answer was no. And so I made some changes. You’re the only one who can evaluate your situation. I can’t and won’t follow you around with a camera to figure out what it is you’re doing. That is keeping you stuck where you are at. It requires a really honest assessment. So some really bad habits that are pretty common. Before I get into the ones that I wanted to touch on procrastination. That’s what jumps out at me. I think that when we procrastinate, it’s bad because nothing is created. We’re not, we’re not doing anything. We’re not achieving, we’re not progressing. And so much of success is just about making incremental progress towards things. We cannot get out of debt in a day, I cannot save for retirement in a day, the longer I have to chip away at things, the better off I am. If I have 50 years to save for my retirement. That’s way better than having 10 years to save for retirement. This is an obvious statement. But you know, not necessarily. There’s a big difference between financial literacy and financial wellness. Financial literacy is what you know, or what you don’t know. So how financially literate Are you? And then financial wellness is what you do or what you don’t do. So literacy and financial literacy is knowing you understand what a budget is how to put a budget together. And then the literacy or the the wellness part is actually doing it. It’s keeping your budget, it’s maintaining your budget. So it’s simple way to think about the difference between those two things. Literacy again is what you know or what you don’t know. Wellness is what you do, or what you don’t do as it would be so procrastination is terrible just avoidance in general. That’s a super human thing to do. I know when I have a problem, I’d like to brush it under the rug or put my head in the sand whatever metaphor you want to use. We are really good at that. I know that I was problems in relationships problems with My diet problems with drinking, whatever, let’s just, let’s just punt on that one. We’ll worry about that tomorrow next week. But the problem with this, you know, is that next week turns into next year and next year turns into 10 years from now. And then we’ve lost a lot of ground. Is it ever too late to do this stuff? Not necessarily. But it’s just way better, the sooner we can get started on it. And then ignorance, being willfully ignorant about these things, and avoiding the knowledge of it, avoiding it, that is obviously not a winning strategy for anything in life, certainly know when it comes to our money. So let’s talk about six things quick six money habits that will keep you poor or, or when you do them, will help you get on the track to whatever kind of financial success that you’re interested in. And whatever that is, that’s what I want for you, if you want to get rich, let’s go. I’m here for it, you just want to get out of debt, great if you want to have financial peace of mind. So you don’t need to worry about or think about money anymore. That’s great to know, I don’t care. It’s really, what’s important is that you know, what it is that you want, what your desires are, what your objectives are, your goals are when it comes to your personal finances. So number one, your habits of managing your cash flow, this will help you to be financially successful, or it will not this is such a standard one. But most people don’t understand how much money is coming in, how much money is going out, they do not know how much debt they have, they do not know the value of their assets. So this is something that you must know, you must pay attention to all of the transactions that you’re making. And that’s for the good money coming in. And it’s money that is going out. And we have the ability to today, get online and look at all of our spending immediately got online banking, you can look at your credit cards, or however it is that you are Pay Pal, that whatever however it is you are transacting and money is moving, it’s really important to be monitoring all of our transactions. And I did for years and years and years didn’t pay attention at all. So the only way I would know if I had any money is when I would go to the ATM. And it would give you a paper receipt and it would say you’ve got eight cents. Like oh, like I guess that’s all the fun for today. Alright, so you’ve got a couple 100 bucks be like I’m rich, let’s go. So however long it’s been since you reviewed your transactions reviewed your cash flow, that is the exercise is to go back and look at everything because you’re gonna find stuff, you’re gonna find stuff you’re spending money on that you no longer value, or you totally forgot about, you can find stuff that shouldn’t be there, there’s going to be a lot of stuff that’ll be there. And then once you go back through however long that’s been it could be a couple years, then just get in the habit of reviewing it on a monthly basis. Once you’re in the habit of doing that, you could certainly switch to quarterly but nothing beyond that. So on a monthly basis, as you are developing your habit. Just pick one day, one time where you’re reviewing all your money stuff, make a money, date or planning money meeting where you were reviewing your cash flow. And you get better at it, it’ll get easier, so on and so forth. habits, habits, make things easier, make things better routines. Number two is your budget. Now, budgeting This is something I resisted forever. And when I would go through a budget. Probably the only reason I budget today is because my wife started doing it with us with me when I was 30 years old. And that was really what got me on the right track. So I didn’t like it. I felt like I was getting called into the principal’s office like I was in trouble. Because probably I was overspending. Today, I recognize and think about budgeting for what it is, which is a very empowering thing because it tells me if I can afford things, a budget will tell you, if I can afford to go out for dinner if I can afford to go on vacation if I can afford to make a new investment if I can afford to retire all of these things. And the opposite is you have no idea, which is anxiety causing. You’re just flying by the seat of your pants, that is stress inducing. It is a habit that will absolutely keep you stuck. And the reality that two thirds of us are living paycheck to paycheck. It’s probably because we don’t have a plan for our money. And that’s what a budget is a plan for our money. Number three is credit management. Credit is ubiquitous just means it’s everywhere. touches every aspect of our lives. Having Good Credit makes life less expensive and better. You can have the things that you want. Having bad credit precludes you from having things do you want to stop you from living where you want to live potentially driving the kind of vehicle you want to drive having the kind of job that you want to have because if you have bad credit, lousy credit, you might not get the job you want. And being in credit card debt.

Well that’s the worst you’re absolutely dry. I needed it. So getting in the habit of maintaining your credits, being a good steward of your credit, this means checking your credit score every year, which you can get from one of your existing creditors. So you need to reach out to a credit card company or auto loan or a home loan, they could tell you your actual score, you should endeavor work really hard to get to 580 as soon as possible. And as I say that 580 or 680, I’ll have to circle back and tell you the number that we need. Because it’s early in the morning where I’m at right now, and and I’m blanking on it. But what’s important from my perspective is that you want to be able to qualify for conventional financing. And that number, either 580, or 680 will help you to qualify for that. So you want to be paying extra. So that is that and then check your credit report every year. And you can do that from sites like free credit report.com. And, really, these days, you can get your credit report in a lot of different places, but checking on it and what you’re looking for discrepancies, you’re looking for stuff that shouldn’t be there accounts that you thought you’re closed, or you did close that are still showing up or debts that you’ve discharged or gotten rid of that are still showing up. Addresses names, numbers that are not yours, that these are potential signs of fraud. And it’s estimated that around 40 million Americans have something on their credit report, which is just shouldn’t be there. So being a good steward of your credit, at least once a year be going through checking out your credit score, checking your credit report. And then just making sure that you are paying your bills on time and staying on top of all of your debt. And maybe it’s not obvious, but doing everything you need to be doing to get out of credit card debt. The next thing is number four is lack of goal setting. If you’re not in the habit of setting goals, you’re in good company, that’s most people, it took me till I was 35 years old actually go through a formalized goal setting process. And now that I’ve been doing it for almost 10 years, I can speak to the absolute impact and power of goal setting. So I really want you to start doing that. And just telling you to do it is is not good enough. And from my perspective. So I’ve created a free goals course you can access. And I’ll link that in the in the notes as well. So saying, You know what, I know that I should be setting goals, but I just haven’t been habit of that. So that’s a wellness thing. You can access the goals course. And while I’m talking about that, we also have a values course. So you can access that for free as well to get crystal clear on what your personal values are. That’s really important because it informs how it is that we interact and spend money. And then finally, I’ve got a free get out of debt course. Because again, that is the worst. And so I want to give you the resources that you need to get out should you be in debt. Number six, or seven, rather, I’m terrible at math today. Number five, number five, yikes. Numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. Number five lack of planning in general. think that the idea of financial planning is one that is kind of abstract, and one that has a lot of complexity and confusion around it. And needlessly so you make financial plans all the time you make financial plans every day, decisions about what you want to get to eat, if you want to go out for lunch or dinner, whatever it might be, you’re making financial plans, where you’re going to vacation, where you’re going, how you’re going to get there where you can stay while you’re there, what you’re going to eat, what you’re going to do for fun, these are all little financial plans that we’re constantly making, and the resources that we have, there’s so many different free resources that are available out there. And in terms of money management, financial management. And I’ll definitely link some of my favorite resources in the comments as well. But I think that there’s a lot of different reasons why we don’t make financial plans, the procrastination, the avoidance, all of these kinds of things. We don’t want to face it. But the resources are available. It’s it’s it is literally at your fingertips to be able to access and make financial plans. And that also goes to consistency piece of making sure that on a monthly basis, you are reviewing your plans. And I’ll sort of tie everything up at the end with that. But the sixth thing, the last thing that I want to talk about just the lack of alignment, and this is a pretty high level thing. As you look at the basic things are cashflow, budgeting credit. It’s goal setting it is planning and then we want to get to the point where we are fully as aligned as we possibly can be. Because we have finite resources. Imagine unless you’re independently wealthy that you have finite amounts of money that you have to allocate towards things. We all have the same amount of time to spend every day. We have the same amount of well, energy attention. So the more we can understand And what are our top priorities are, this is what matters to me. And this is what’s most important. And then how I make decisions with my money, what I spend it on what I want invest in all of these things. When I line those up, get them aligned to my goals, my values, what’s most important. That’s when we really start making breakthroughs start really moving in the direction of what’s most important to us. Because that’s the most important thing is what’s important to you. You are fully capable of becoming financially successful and enjoying financial peace of mind, whatever it is that you’re interested in having or doing from a financial planning, or just general financial standpoint. It’s available to you, but you’re not entitled to it. You need to work, do the work. But it’s right at your fingertips and I want you to do the work because what I know for sure is we need you and me to do our part. Doing our best

Transcribed by https://otter.ai