Your Money Is Your Business!

There is magic in writing a business plan and a projected financial statement budget. The physical act of writing will help you: • Crystallize and organize your thoughts about your life. • Interpret your dreams in real world terms. Make your dreams your objectives. • Open your mind to dream about whatever you desire to do and to have in your life. • “Follow your bliss.” What would bring you the greatest joy and satisfaction you can imagine? What achievements would make you feel as contented as a cat sleeping on a sunny window sill? • Dream big. Dream expansively about all that you would like to do during your life, all the income you would like to earn, and all the wealth you would like to accumulate • Dream big, BUT, and this is a Big BUT, never plan to live beyond your current means. Dream big, but plan a financially prudent lifestyle. • To spur your dreaming: o Ask older people who are closer to the end of the line than you are what they would do in life if they could have a do-over. o Brainstorm with family, advisors, and close friends in whom you can confide. Ask them what they would do if they could do whatever they dreamed of doing. Don’t put artificial limits on your dreams, and don’t let anybody else try to do it either. • Don’t tell yourself “I could never do that.” Maybe you couldn’t do it this year, or next year. But maybe you could do it after 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years of diligently working at learning new skills, practicing the skills you learn, gaining life experience, and surrounding yourself with good people who would help you achieve your dream objectives. • Free your mind of any limitations that you may have been placing upon yourself, or limitations that other people may have tried to place upon you. • There is a lot of truth to the saying “you can be whatever you want to be if you try hard enough”. • Library shelves are full of biographies of people who had a dream, were told they couldn’t do whatever it was that they dreamed of doing, and then they went out and did it anyway. Putting your dreams into words might be tough. • Some people might run into a mental roadblock when trying to put their dreams into words because they can’t get visions of the great lives they think other people are living out of their minds (beware feelings of envy). Focus on your vision for your life. • And some people just haven’t given themselves the freedom to think about what they would do “If only … wasn’t stopping me”. Plan how to get past “if only’s”. Set your sights high, but understand that time will limit how many of our dreams each of us can fully achieve in the one lifetime we get. • If you could live enough years, and you used your planning process diligently enough, you could achieve pretty much every objective you set for yourself. • However, given the different starting points in life from which each of us begins to use a formal planning process, how far each of us will have to go to get to our dream destinations, and the limited years of life each of us will have to get there (some will get more years, some will get less years), most of us won’t have all the time we would need in order to achieve all of our dream objectives – but we will get as close to realizing our dreams as humanly possible. • “Life is more about the journey than the destination”. Plan to enjoy every single day. Be a happy, optimistic pragmatist who understands “you can only do what you can do.” Picture how you want to be living in the future. Hindsight is 20/20. Foresight is 20/400. Use your planning process as binoculars to help you see the lifestyle you desire to be living 20, 30 or more years in the future. • The younger we are, the more difficult it is to visualize ourselves at an older age. An 18 year old may hear mom and dad talk about concerns of theirs and not fully understand those concerns. By age 50 it is likely she would have a far better understanding. • The older we get the smarter we get about the past. How many times have you looked back on what you did when you were younger and said to yourself “What was I thinking?” or “I should have done …” Well, now is the time to flip your view of life around. Instead of looking back, look ahead to your future. What will make the older you say “I’m glad I did that years ago”? Using a planning process can make us smarter about the future. • Read Aesop’s Fable about the Grasshopper and the Ants. It speaks directly to planning for future financial security and doing things today to provide for that future security. It is brutally tough to picture ourselves in the future having a lot less money than we need - living in fear of how to pay for food, medicine, and shelter as limited savings run dry. Picture the Grasshopper and the Ants instead. Plan accordingly. • Writing a business plan and projected financial statement budget for 10, 20, 30 or more years out into the future will focus your thinking on the lifestyles you want to be living at each of those times and how much money it will take to finance those lifestyles. Don’t get stuck in your past as you dream about your future. The past has only two uses: • Memories to enjoy. • Lessons to learn.