212: Saving for Your Future Self: Retirement, Leave, and Big Goals in Private Practice

Linzy Bonham : If you are managing money with somebody else, there are two sets of stories that you're dealing with. And so, you know, I before I've heard a therapist say that their husband looks over their shoulder at their business bank accounts is like, whoa, I could buy a new truck with that money. It is not truck money. It is retirement money.

Welcome to Money Skills for Therapists, the podcast that helps therapists and health practitioners in private practice go from money confusion and shame to to calm, clarity and confidence with their finances. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by numbers or avoided looking at your business money, you're in the right place. I'm Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of Money Skills for Therapists. Before we jump in, I want to remind you of something really important.

Linzy Bonham : Most of us highly skilled and competent therapists and health practitioners were never taught about money. Not in grad school, not in supervision, not anywhere. And yet here we are, running businesses that need to take care of us while we're busy taking care of others. It is a lot of pressure.

So if part of you feels anxious about money avoidant, or like a bit of a hot mess financially, I want you to know that you are not alone. And I am here to help. Through my free live workshops each month, I teach practical financial skills to help you feel more grounded, calm and confident with your private practice money. You can see what's coming up and save your spot to join live or register for the replay@moneyskillsfortherapist.

com workshops. Linzy Bonham : Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today is a solo episode.

You just get me and I'm going to be talking about saving for your future self inside your business. So our private practice finances, the bank accounts, those business finances that we build, that go with them, which if, if you don't already have a separate bank account going for your business, please pause this podcast episode now and go make one and then come back. I'll still be here. Those business bank accounts that we have can be a very powerful vehicle to save for our future goals and take care of our future selves.

And today I'm going to be talking about why you should save inside your business for your future self and also how to save inside your business for your future self. Linzy Bonham : But first, I'm going to talk about this concept of a future self. It may or may not be something that makes immediate sense to you and why it can be helpful for us as therapist types, as helper healer types of humans to think about our future selves as Someone a little bit separate from us. Whenever we're making a financial decision, we are working with a dollar that we have today that we could also have tomorrow.

So we can choose to spend it today, or we can choose to set it aside, maybe invest it and have it grow for tomorrow. So we're always balancing the needs of the person we are today, our current self, and this in the moment human that you are in this very second with the needs of your future self, which is the person you're going to be in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. As therapists, we do have this exceptional ability to prioritize the needs of others. So if you have found that it is difficult to save for the future to kind of like defer a purchase, if you find yourself really impulse spending, wanting to just spend the money that you have now, you know you've got that money burning a hole in your pocket.

I had a conversation with my seven year old the other day. Linzy Bonham : He gets $7 a week allowance because he's seven years old. And he was like, Mom, I have $14, like we have to go spend Lego. And I was like, is that money like burning a hole in your pocket?

Like knowing you have the $14, you need to spend it now? And he was like, yes. So I told him how in the future that's gonna be a little harder cause he'll have to pay for other things. But as adults we can have this too, right?

It's like we have the money so we want to spend it, it's there. So we want to turn it into something we can have now. But whenever we spend the money we have now, it's not around for our future self. So thinking about our future self as separate can look a few different ways.

Linzy Bonham : Sometimes even just naming the fact that you have a future self and thinking about who they're going to be. Who are you going to be in October? What's it going to be like when you're 50? Who's that 50 year old version going to be?

And then we also really want to think about that 65 year old version of you, that 75 year old version, that 85 year old version. Because the money that you're making now is also going to need to take care of them. There is going to be a point in your career where you stop earning and you're going to be living off the money that you have set aside now. And if you are coming into your earning years, if you're in your 30s and your 40s and you're seeing money that's like probably getting to be like your high watermark 50s.

This is when we like earn kind of the most. I'd say probably between our mid-40s and our mid-50s. We're at the peak of our career. Linzy Bonham : We're making the most money we're ever going to make.

This is the time to really be sure that you're thinking about your future self because they need you to be saving money now for them. If that's hard to connect with, sometimes it can be helpful to use one of those AI apps that helps you visualize your future self. What are you going to look like when you're 65, 75, 85 years old to really get that sense of like, oh, there they are, there's me in the future. For me, I like to joke that I just need to look at my mother and I see, I see what I'm going to look like in 30 years.

Seeing myself and being like, yeah, I look at pictures of my mother when she was my age, she looked like I look now. And now she's in her 70s, right? I will be in my 70s at some point and the money, the way I manage money today is going to impact the well being of who I am in my 70s. Another thing that's really important about thinking about our future self in our business is no one else is saving for your retirement for you.

Linzy Bonham : When you are working for a company that has a pension plan, if you have an employer who makes automatic contributions into, if you're Canadian, you're rsp, if you're American, your ira, then that person is taking care of it for you. There's something automated you've plugged into a bigger system where your retirement is being taken care of. When we are self employed, when we are in private practice or we're running a group practice, we're also responsible for the business that needs to take care of us.

So we are actually the ones who have to set it up so that the business is contributing to our retirement and is making that money available for the future, is giving us money that we can invest. If we're not doing that, if we're not setting up the business to take care of us and to take care of our future self. Nobody else is doing that for us. It's just not happening.

And I know for private practitioners this can be a point where it's like, I want to acknowledge that this might have brought up a nauseating level of anxiety in you if this is something you've been avoiding. Linzy Bonham : And so I'M sharing this with you in a loving way for you now and for your future self. Of let's think about them, let's make sure that they're gonna be okay and the decisions that you're making today are not. Meaning that they're gonna go without.

Right. And that you're gonna have a shitty retirement. Cause I don't want that for you. I want you to have a great retirement after you've spent decades serving other people.

We wanna make sure that not only are you enjoying your life now and you're being taken care of now, but you're also being taken care of in those later years of your life. Linzy Bonham : So this is where there is a core tension too with the future self. Because we also don't want to make sure that we're prioritizing the future self over our current self. We need to also make sure that we're enjoying life now because we actually don't know what retirement's going to look like.

You know, sometimes you hear stories, sad stories, of people who worked their butts off their whole career and then die first year into retirement or never get to retire. So when we're thinking about our future self, we also need to acknowledge and be aware that we don't want to be putting money aside for the future at the expense of ourself today. So the dollars that we're managing and we're gonna be doing this inside our business needs to both be taking care of us now. Making sure that we're enjoying our one and only human life.

Whatever chapter you're in, whether it's about having more time, flexibility to be with your kids, whether it's about doing some travel and trips that you can do now and enjoy now, but you won't be able to enjoy in 10 years, we're balancing our current self and our current stage and chapter of life with that future self. Linzy Bonham : So. So we never want to be taking care of the future self to the detriment of the current self. But we also don't want to be giving the current self everything that they want to the detriment of the future self.

So there's two selves here that we are holding with love and reverence and balance and making sure that we're taking care of both. So in terms of how to actually save for your future self and save for your big goals inside of your business, I find that separate bank accounts are the most clarifying ways to earmark money in a business. So this would be based off a profit first style model. You know, May we all be thankful to Mike Michalowicz for popularizing this idea that we can have these separate bank accounts in our businesses and it can give us so much financial clarity.

When I teach the Profit first system to Therapists Inside of Money Skills for Therapists program and the Money Skills for Group Practice Owners program, I teach a modified version of Profit first that also adds a big goals account. Linzy Bonham : Thinking about the stage of life that you're in now, you can think about what that big goal would be for you. Is it retirement? I would say, I would suggest everybody puts a little bit aside for retirement every month.

Even if you're 26, it's so powerful. If you put aside $100 a month at 26 years old, that is actually more impactful than putting aside $500 a month at 45 years old. So putting aside a little bit for retirement is always a good idea. I would suggest that your business should always be taking care of your retirement, regardless of your age.

But you might also have more pressing big goals coming your way. Maybe it's saving for a maternity leave so you can actually take time off with your new baby. Linzy Bonham : For Americans, this is really important. You don't get any leave from the government like we do in Canada.

In Canada we get a top up from the government. If you've opted into employment insurance as a self employed person in Canada, you will get that ei, that employment insurance money to help with your mat leave. If you're American, you have to make that happen yourself. So it might be that thinking about your stage of life, saving for a mat leave is the most powerful thing you can do in your business.

So set up a bank account for maternity leave. If it's retirement, set up a bank account for retirement. Linzy Bonham : If it's a big home renovation, set up a bank account for home renovation. Or you have all three of these things in a big goals account.

But make it separate. Let's use the systems and the skills that you're building inside your business to really take care of you, your near future self, your future self a year from now when you go on mat leave, and also your future self 30 years from now when you're retired and you're going, you're flying across the country to Visit your now 30 year old child, right? We're going to take care of both of these people at the same time. So setting up that separate bank account is really important.

If you're already doing a profit first system, then you can just modify your profit first percentages to account for these big Goals lines. It could be that 3% of every dollar that comes in the door goes to big goals. It could be 5%. Linzy Bonham : It is important when we're saving for big goals that we don't overdo it.

Saving in small sustainable ways is far more sustainable than trying to throw a bunch of money into an account or into a goal, or as we've talked about on this podcast before, onto a credit card and then end up being so short on cash that you either have to stop saving for that goal or dip back into debt. It's never helpful to see ourselves having to stop a plan that we've laid out. It's much more helpful to lay out a sustainable plan from the beginning. For instance, I want to go on mat leave in two years or a year and a half.

I'm going to start trying now, but I don't know when that mat leave will be. So I'm going to set aside 200, $300 a month. That's a sustainable amount. Linzy Bonham : That's going to keep building up, right?

At some point I'll know when my mat leave is going to be and maybe I'm going to step up that goal. But you can start saving for it well in advance for retirement. Maybe at first you can only find $100 a month to put towards retirement. Do it.

Put that 1% or that hundred dollars towards retirement. You are in doing so building a muscle and a skill and a system of sending money where you really want it to go that then you can always increase. As your caseload grows, that becomes $200. Or as your caseload grows, that 2% that was $300 now becomes $600 a month.

Linzy Bonham : Right? But we're building that pathway. And the powerful thing about building into your profit first too is you're making it a top line priority. Whenever you go to disseminate your money, you're making your transfers to your different accounts.

You're going to see that money is going to your salary, to your taxes, to your operating expenses. But you're also going to see money going specifically to a maternity leave or specifically to retirement. And then you are seeing yourself take care of yourself, which is also powerful. We want to manage money intentionally in a way that we can also witness and be witness to us making great choices.

That feels good. Linzy Bonham : That is a kind of a self affirming loop there where we see, hey, look at this. Every time I make $100, $5 of that is going towards my retirement. Taking that in and seeing yourself making those good decisions can also build that sense of agency, Inc.

And that sense of power that you have that you are making money go where it needs to go. Look at this. You're doing it every time you take care of your money. If you're not using a profit first style system, then it could be that you send aside a dollar amount.

It's like every time you go to pay yourself, you also send a hundred bucks to that retirement bank account. Linzy Bonham : And then once a month, you send that off to your actual retirement investments. Another powerful piece of doing this in your business is not only are you making it just part of how you manage your money, you're making that big goal a priority that you can see at all times, but you're also skipping sending money home. In your business, you have one set of money stories.

You have your money stories. You have whatever narrative you were infused with from your family of origin, from your religion, from your culture, you have one set of stories that you're working with at home. If you are managing money with somebody else, there are two sets of stories that you're dealing with. And so, you know, I, before I've heard a therapist say that, that their husband looks over their shoulder at their business bank accounts is like, whoa, I could buy a new truck with that money.

It is not truck money. Linzy Bonham : It is retirement money. It is home renovation money. By not sending the money home, you are also making sure that you are keeping it out of that home finance territory, which can be much more complex than the business finance territory, and sending it exactly where you need to go.

Whenever we can bypass our home finances, we are kind of keeping the money clear, clean, sending it directly to where it needs to go and keeping it out of that space of personal finances, which might be an area that you and your partner are still figuring out as a couple. How you manage money as a couple, what matters to you? Also, if, like me, you're very tempted to spend your money on your kids at home, you're like, oh, I could buy my kid the nicer bicycle. I can send them to another summer camp when we bypass home.

Once again, now you're not being pulled in a thousand directions to spend that money. In all the complexity of personal finance, no matter what is happening at home, still there is that $200 a month going right from your business into your retirement accounts. Linzy Bonham : It is being taken care of. Or there's money sit building up in your business for that maternity leave.

And your household is not tempted to take that money because ideally, you've started to pay yourself a regular paycheck. Which is a whole different conversation. And there's a regular predictable amount going home. And the business gets to take care of these big goals just completely separate from what's happening in your personal finances at home.

So very powerful to connect with that concept of the future self. Thinking about how you want to do that. Linzy Bonham : Maybe this is an area to journal on, to do one of those AI age enhancing, to just look at your relatives who are 30 or 40 years older than you and be like, damn, at one point they were also in their 40s and now they're in their 80s. If I'm lucky, that will be me too.

Really connecting with that fact that you have a future, thinking about what are the most important goals right now at this stage of your life, what is most valuable, what are the most powerful things your money can do for you. And then making that happen inside your business, keeping it separate from those personal finances, that can be much messier, much more complicated. Let's use the simplicity of business finances, the fact that it's just you and you're already having to manage your money intentionally already to also save for those goals for your future self.

So coming into this episode, I want you to think about what your next step is. Whether it's setting up that bank account, whether it's. Whether it's deciding on an amount to set aside. Linzy Bonham : Take some action.

See yourself saving for your future. It feels good and it also is going to be very impactful. Yourself of 10 and 20 years from now is going to be very grateful that you were already thinking about them at this stage of the game. If you would like to connect more with me and my team, I want to tell you about a brand new thing that we are launching.

Very cool. We are creating a private WhatsApp community. WhatsApp is where my team lives. Linzy Bonham : That's the app I spend all day looking at.

It's where we run some of our programs out of. Some of our private course communities are on WhatsApp. And we are now creating a private WhatsApp community just for folks who are really into what we do around here. So we're not sharing the link publicly.

If you are interested in joining our private WhatsApp community where you can connect with other awesome therapists who are also working on creating a better relationship with money, where you can connect with Diane, who coaches with me, who's amazing, I'll be dropping to that community sometimes. We'll also have special guest appearances from some of my amazing business friends that you've heard on this podcast. If you would like to have that connection to the amazing folks who are in our community.

Linzy Bonham : Send us an email. It's hellooneynutsandbolts.com Let us know that you're interested in the WhatsApp community and we will send you the link to join and be part of those small, intimate conversations about money and how do we get money really working for us as therapists who also care about people and want to make the world a better place. How do we balance these things?

How do we actually make money work for us in our businesses and our lives? Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Send us an email to hellooneynutsandbolts.com if you want to be part of the WhatsApp community.

And I really appreciate you joining me today.