Your First Step Towards Financial Success Is to Decide What Success Looks Like
Google “money” and you’ll get over 3 billion results. Everyone’s got their opinion. Some will tell you that it’s the root of all evil, others that it makes the world go round.
It can be very emotive but at a simple level it’s just a tool, a method of exchange.
Your work is an exchange of your time for someone else’s money. Anything that you don’t spend now you can store in savings and investments to spend later. And in order to retire you just need to make sure that your pot will last you until the day you die.
EVERYTHING IS A TRADE-OFF
So, every money decision you’ll ever make is a trade-off. If you use it for A, it’s at the expense of B. That’s straightforward on paper, but tough in real life because in modern culture we are subjected to a daily barrage of marketing and distraction. Everyone wants some of our money or some of our attention and it is becoming increasingly easy to spend it.
To stay in control, it’s in your interest to be deliberate about how you use it and how you value it.
A TEXTBOOK ANSWER AND A REAL LIFE ONE
Take the size of your rainy-day fund as an example.
A textbook approach might be to keep a modest emergency fund - say 6 months’ expenditure - and then take more risk with the balance because money in the bank is likely to lose value after inflation. On paper, cash is unlikely to be a great long-term investment.
But you don’t live your life in a textbook. If having 5 years’ worth of expenditure in the bank allows you and your family to sleep easily at night, relaxed in the knowledge that if you lose your job, you won’t lose your home, it’s providing you with a priceless amount of value.
Someone else might shudder at the thought of that level of cash and would see it as a wasted opportunity.
SUCCESS IS BEAUTIFULLY SUBJECTIVE
The beauty of success is that it is completely subjective. All that’s important is what matters to you, not to your friends or colleagues or neighbours or some celebrity on the TV. Their definition of success is different.
The more you can understand your own values and then use your money, as the tool that it is, to help you stay as close to those values as possible, the more successful your financial journey is likely to be.
It’s about bringing meaning to your money, translating it into real life, changing it from an object into an emotion, making it come alive. Without that, you have no clear direction or destination.
To find out how we can help you define your own version of success, click here.
The value of your investments can go down as well as up, so you could get back less
than you invested.
Tax and Estate planning is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
Comments