Ep 224: Preparation for Financial Success: What Most People Miss Part 2

Have you ever had a money or career question you really wanted to ask, but didn't know who to go to, or just felt uncomfortable even bringing it up. You're not alone. Talking about money can feel intimidating, even scary, and that's exactly what I'm trying to change. That's why I created a free virtual coffee chat, a casual, no pressure, twenty minute conversation where you can bring one thing you're wrestling with and we'll talk it through.

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I'm Michelle Perkins, your host. My search for more fulfilling work led me to career in business coaching, where I stumbled upon a game changing discovery. Money issues often start with our mindset and habits. You see, our relationship with money is the key to overcoming those frustrating financial obstacles.

As an entrepreneur, coach, and problem solver, I'm passionate about helping you create a great relationship with money, because turns out that's the foundation for a limit free life. Each week on Money and You, I speak with amazing guests about all things money, mindset, practical tips, and everything in between. We're here to give you new insights, education, and empowerment, so money can be one of your favorite relationships. So join us for some lively conversations and let's transform your financial life together.

Hello. Hello, welcome to part two of the Money Money and You Show, where I've been talking about preparation, readiness, preparedness to accept and embrace and enjoy that financial wealth and abundance and well being and access that you say you want. Because we can say all day long what we want, and unless we are really kind of employing the right mindset and also doing some practical things that set the ball in motion that create the momentum to move forward, it's going to be super tough.

So I talked on the last show, part one. If you didn't see part one, please do. I think that's really the most important piece, that is the mindset piece. I always think that's the most important piece because a lot of times we put all kinds of things together and we do all kinds of things, and then we are asking ourselves, why is none of this working?

Why isn't it happening yet? I've done X, Y, and Z, and I'm still not seeing the results that I want. Typically, if you are saying that to yourself, it's a mindset issue. You are blocked or stock or making decisions based on thoughts, beliefs, feelings, identities that are sending you down the wrong road.

So that is key. And what we talked about in the first show is the preparation for your emotional and psychological parts of your brain. So one thing we talked about is you don't rise to the occasion, you fall to your preparation. So opportunities are going to come to you.

You're going to want things out there. And again, if you aren't clear on what you want, there is a vision workbook that I've put together. It's free. I will put the link in the show notes and you can access that and get much more clear on your vision.

Because if we don't know what our vision is, how in the world do we know how much money we need? So step one and step one B is really getting your mindset. They're both right up there. You need both a good vision that you can ultimately quantify to see how much money that you want.

And you're preparing for your mindset because you want to be ready for those opportunities that are inevitably going to come to you should you get your mindset in good order. So again, preparation is everything. You will be ready to go when things show up. So we also talked about your financial identity, perhaps setting a lower ceiling for you than you want, maybe holding you back to a set point that is no longer what you want, no longer where you want to see yourself holding you back, it's holding you down.

And there's this emotional capacity for money. How emotionally open are you to learning about money, to pay attention to your numbers, to getting to know your money and really being using it as a great tool for your life. You have to be emotionally open to that. You have to stop saying I hate looking at my numbers, and you need to start embracing what that is information is going to do for you.

Okay, trusting yourself with money, that's huge. So trusting yourself with money is a mindset area. You really have to learn how to be more trusting. If you don't trust decisions you've made in the past, and the question you want to ask yourself is how do I make better decisions?

What do I need to learn so that my decisions take me where I want to go? So that was a lot of mindset, and you can go back and listen to that show if you haven't really done some journaling or some writing or some thinking on where you are, the things that you say to yourself and where you need to go. That's the first step. Second step is today's show, which are the practical things that you can do to prepare.

We want to prepare for these opportunities when they come to us. If you're getting ready to buy a car, you've been wanting a car for a long time, first thing you do is try to figure out what kind of car, what's my budget, what do I love, what's out there? What color do I want? Do I want it to, you know, be a hybrid or an electric or a gas guzzler, or what do I want?

And so you're doing preparation and you start looking at different things. You go and you test drive some car. This is all preparation for buying a car. You're not just gonna go out one morning having no idea what car you want.

I mean you might, but you probably want to prepare to get a good deal. So and you want to have your credit score and order you want to have, you know, figure out how are you're going to get this down payment or fix up a car you want to trade. This is all preparation that we almost do automatically. We don't give this a whole lot of thought.

It's kind of just obvious, right. We want money matters to become like that, things that we just know how to do. We're not sitting there in angst at home like wringing our hands, going, I don't know how to buy this car. Maybe you do with your first car, but later in life it's all of this is obvious.

So we want it to be like that with our money. How how do we do anything in life successfully? We start doing, we start trying. So money is one of those things where a lot of us don't try.

We don't even do things on a small scale because we're so worried about what might happen, because we're so afraid of losing money. And that's an important mindset too that we didn't even talk about last week. But there will be some losing of money. Money is an energy flow.

It's in and out, and some of it will go out and not come back to us. And in other cases we'll barely put anything out and a lot will come back to us. So we can't always even the score perfectly. You know.

I know young people who have lost a lot of money in an investment that they made and they're so upset about it. You know what, being young is all you need in that case. You can make it up, so, you know, And I just I could talk about every age group too. It's so fascinating.

There are different practical things that you might want to be doing at each age. That's good preparedness, so other things. Other ways to prepare with money very much includes starting early. If you want to be a well prepared person in the world of money, there's nothing better that you can do.

Then start now. If you're young, you're golden, start now. If you're older, maybe you miss some time, but still start now. Starting now is one of the things that you want to be prepared to do.

And if you've been all your life somebody who puts these things off and says someday, someday, someday, stop that that is the number one practical thing that you can do. Start small if you're nervous about it, but take that action and also make sure that you adjust as you get more comfortable. You don't want to start small and stay small. You want to start small and routinely go through and say, okay, can I add ten percent to the savings that I've been doing for the last six months that I'm not actually finding is bothering me.

I've forgotten all about it. It's an automatic, you know, transfer to my savings account, and I've completely forgotten about it. I don't even feel it felt like a big deal. Now it's nothing.

I could adjust to none another ten percent, and when that feels like nothing, I'll adjust it again because that's what's going to happen. Money that is out of our world we forget all about, and honestly, it does not impact us very much. So let's talk about a few ways to prepare practically. Number one, can't stop saying it.

Know your numbers, don't attach emotional drama to it. Just know them when they look great, give yourself a little clap when they look terrible. Don't beat yourself up. Make some new decisions.

It's all, if numbers look terrible, it is the ultimate result. It's the consequence of prior decisions. Okay, and we know that, we just don't necessarily want to think about it or look at it. But that's a practical thing to do.

What decisions have I been making that have led me here? And that goes across the board, that goes to health and relationships and everything else. You can sit there and you can go back and think about the decisions that have led you to a certain place, and guess what, that's a beautiful thing because, especially if you've done your mindset work, you can just make some new decisions. Really, let's not over dramatize all of this.

We get very, very very melodramatic with our money, and when you can start not to do that, you're light years ahead. I have a saying in my Money dating course that I always like to share with people. When you're talking with people about money, say things about your money like you would say pass the potatoes, like that much emotional charge which is essentially zero, And do the same when you talk to yourself, because honestly, adding all this emotionality into it, and highly charged emotional kind of energy that is in large part what is stopping most people their money just has this I think because we're so afraid of not having it, or you know what that might mean, because we've spot a whole story.

I mean, when I was young, I had a whole story about not wanting to end up on welfare. That's a huge part of why I went into accounting. At the time I did, it was a frankly ridiculous thought. I mean, I was working like three jobs at the time, and I knew how to work, so doubt that would have happened.

But I got it in my head. Maybe I just learned about it or read some things about people on welfare, and I freaked out and I made decisions based on that thought. It was a It was a I mean, I'm not regretting the way I went, but I could have had much more productive thoughts at that time than that one. And in many cases, a thought like that can lead you to doing things that you really don't enjoy doing.

So know your numbers. Number one. You don't need to make it complicated. You just need to be clear.

You need to look at everything, okay, and I have a lot of ways to do that. I've got a worksheet that can help you just to see which I will be putting in the show notes so you can grab it just to see what are the things when you say no your network is what numbers do I need to know? And I will show you what those are. Definitely, you want to know your income and you want to know what you're spending.

And that sounds so basic, and I can tell you even for me, when I was working at Disney and dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars, when I went home, did I want to look at my numbers? Not really. They seem pretty insignificant and small, and like I would just blow it off a lot. So know your numbers.

It's really really important. What's coming in, what's going out, what do I owe? Where's my debt? And what have I saved?

Just those four numbers are such a good place to start. So know them and have a plan to continue to know them, because what they are today isn't going to be what they are next month, or next quarter or next year. So we don't want to know them today and never look at them again for another five years. So put a system into place, whether that's a monthly money date where you look at all those things again because those also will change.

I mean, and for many of us, especially business ownership, income is going to fluctuate. So it's not a matter of knowing today. It's a matter of knowing an average over six months or a year or more, even what's going out. There are times when we have a extraordinary expense, we have something that's going out that isn't a normal thing to go out.

Maybe we're going on a vacation, or or we just had a huge car issue or a home issue where there was a lot of maintenance. So we need to be able to know the numbers well enough to know this is out of the norm. The norm is that I spend this amount and this month I had to come up with a little extra. Now where did that extra come from?

Did you have to go into debt for it? Do you have savings for such an event? So this is where you get to know your numbers. And numbers always tell a story.

They always tell you what decisions you've been making. They always if you don't have money for those tires when they need to be replaced, what is the story there? The story is I said I wanted to save money, but I never did, and now I need tires and I'll have to go into debt. That's a very simple story, but it's an informative story, and you can use that to make get a different story next time.

You're gonna need new tires, because there will be it next time. So most of our anxiety around money, I can tell you this for a fact, just simply comes from avoiding it. And we can make up all kinds of reasons why we're stressed about money. We can say it's because I don't make enough.

We can say my job's never pay me enough. I should have gotten a promotion, but I didn't. All of these things. The world is collapsing, the market is bad, whatever you want to tell yourself.

The bottom line is the Probably the real reason is avoiding your money. Even if your job doesn't pay that well, it might be more problem that you're just either overspending or just not managing money. Maybe of all kinds of things that could just disappear if you just managed it better. Bake fees and interest and you know, things that you're not paying any attention to.

So I know a lot of people leave their because they say I have to get a higher paying job. They go to the next job. Maybe it even is higher paying, but they're still not managing their money well and so it really doesn't matter. I mean, that's not a problem.

So we need to really be looking at what we're doing, be honest about what you're doing. That's one of the biggest things with money. We can say all day long, Yeah, I look at my money, I look at my bank statements. But we don't really know our numbers.

We look at them, we get a snapshot, do we remember could you tell me, off the top of your head exactly what your income is and exactly what you're spending is each month? Probably not. One of my money mentors early early on, who I felt was brilliant, told me that any moment of the day, she could tell you exactly how much money she made yesterday and how much money went out, Like she just was that in the know, and she wasn't making an effort at that point. It was just part of her daily routine was to check in to see it and to remember for the next day because that information informed her as to, you know, kind of some of the things that she should do going forward.

So we want to know our numbers, We want a spending plan. Once we know how much we're spending, we can figure out what we want to spend, not just what we're spending. That's how we roll here in this country. In many respects, we're spending, but we haven't made a decision that that's the spending we want to be doing.

It's just what we're doing. We're you know, we're going out and we're spending our days doing certain things. And then at the end of the month, the realization happens that this is what we spend. It wasn't a spending plan.

It was just spending, random spending. I do it all the time, So you know, I'm not saying anything that I don't know about, which is why I know that having an actual plan is better. So when you say to yourself, this much is going to my fixed expenses, my rent, my car payment, my student loan, whatever, and this is the remaining money. Some of that's going to go to savings, some of that's going to go to pay off some debt, and the rest of it is available discretionary income, and maybe I'll spend it on these things.

Oh can you just feel when you even I just mean even saying that, I feel how the anxiety just sort of flows away because we're in the know, we're at the controls. We got the steering wheel. That's what matters. It doesn't actually matter as much that you don't have the level of income or the level of in your bank account that you want.

What matters is that you feel like, I've got the steering wheel and I'm not there yet, but I'm driving and i know where I'm going and I'm going to get there. So think about it that way. We want to align. We don't want to punish ourselves.

We want to align our choices and our consequences with that vision that where I want to go. That alignment there's a flow of energy and alignment that will feel good. You'll know. You'll know because you'll feel good.

And when you're talking about money, or you're thinking about money, or you're looking at money and you don't feel good, something's misaligned and you want to dig in and find what it is. And it's probably going to be simpler than you thought. I mean the smallest action. I mean, if you're not saving and you start saving one hundred dollars a month, you're saving, maybe not the ultimate goal, but you're saving and it's going to start to feel good and you're going to chip away just a little by little at that anxiety and that stress.

You want to build stability first, and this is where I think a lot of people go wrong, especially in today's world where everybody's listening to TikTokers and everybody else talking about what you can spend your money on. Plus, we're such a consumeristic world. I mean, I can't believe how many ads I see just when I get on Instagram for exams and they're attractive. I go down the rabbit hole and I look at things, and then I realized what am I doing?

Because we are just in this you know, this world where you press a button and you just bought something. I mean, that's kind of crazy for your money. So we want to be very aware. It's okay to put stuff in a cart and then wait twenty four hours before you buy it.

Typically you want want into buying it, you want to care about it anymore. So stability comes before growth, and stability means getting our ducks in a row, getting that emergency savings put together, getting our debt down, you know, either paid off, which is the goal, or at least down to some manageable amount, taking care of things that just have not been taken care of. Maybe you want to renegotiate some loans or things like that. So these are the things that you want to set up a nice little structure.

It's like setting up your house. You want things in certain places. To know where things are, you want to know what's happening with them. That gives you some breathing room and really you will feel better.

So before you're worried about you know, I need to go buy a house, or I need to start investing, make sure that the foundation is built. And you can go back to so many shows I've done on how to build that great foundation. It's super important. Probably every guest that comes on would agree, and many many of them have talked about that.

So I'll tiny to put some of those shows actually in the show notes. Reducing decision fatigue, that's another one. That's another practical thing that we need to do because sometimes we just get so muddled up in our head. Just like not knowing our numbers, we don't even know what we want to do.

We don't know what decisions we need to make. And that's where sitting down and clearing the cobwebs and really looking at things clearly will help you see, Okay, there's like twenty decisions I need to make. We need to relook at my insurances, I need to re look at it everything. That's where you can just get exhausted at the prospect of even making these decisions, and oh my gosh, what if I make a wrong decision.

Most of the time, a decision is a good thing. And unless you're doing something major, you know you're really going on on a limb with some big amount for an investment or something, the decisions we're making are not that big a deal. If you're making a decision to call your bank and change your interest rate or do a balance transfer card, that's not a decision. You have to really have too much angst around.

So if you're constantly making decisions about money and they all feel big and they all feel confusing, ratchet back a little, like start telling yourself, Okay, let's pick out the three top decisions I should focus on now. Don't try to decide everything at once. It's like having kids and trying to decide everything from where they're going to go to preschool to all the way to college. Like that's too much.

So don't do that to yourself with money, and we do. We'll often feel like we should be able to handle that. No, we shouldn't. When you start telling yourself what you should be able to do and handle, be very careful of that too.

Make sure it's accurate, okay, because that's the other thing. Not only do we have this decision fatigue with money, we have judgment fatigue. We get so tired of being upset with ourselves or what we haven't done, or what opportunity we missed, or how we weren't ready for this or that, or you know, maybe I should have done taken a different job, gone down a different career path. My gosh, you know.

Not only is their decision fatigue, there's just over analyzing fatigue that comes with money. So again, we're making it bigger than it needs to be. We're making it more overwhelming, more drama filled than it needs to be. And we can do that with anything.

I took a friend shopping at Trader Shows and she's been kind of sick, hasn't been out a lot, and when we were in Trader Joe's, I'm having a ball because it's fun to shop and you know, it was helping her and just kind of grabbing everything that she wanted off the shelves. And she said, you know, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed, and I thought, I get it, but it's it was the mindset she was in, not having been there and not knowing what she needed, not knowing, you know, how much she was going to be using.

That's how we get with money. We get that way with everything. We can easily overwhelm ourselves. If you're feeling overwhelmed, try to figure out why and step back and just take it down a level.

Okay, you don't have to do it all at once. Things to help relieve you of decision making are things like automatic transfers, pay off your debt, automatically pay off your and you can do that. You can do like the minimum payment automatically for your debt. Then you know you're not going to encour any fees.

You're also not going to be paying it off very quickly. So if you just want to make sure you avoid any bank fees, do that. But then the other decision is still going to be left of how much extra can I throw at it every month? So maybe you don't pay the minimum.

You pay more than the minimum, you put that on automatic. Boom, no more thinking, no more decisions. Same with savings, same with all kinds of things. So the more you can have done automatically.

There are budgeting tools, there are money trackers of so many different kinds. That takes some of the decision making out. You make decisions. Once you decide what categories certain things go in, you don't have to think about it again.

It'll automatically put those things there and you'll be able to see your spending. So also plan for real life, because the other thing that gets us is we do all these practical things and then they're like, wow, you know, I got sick, I lost my job, something happened, and now everything's thrown off, like you know, and that will do a number on your mind set. But also it might impact what you've been doing practically. You might have to use some money for something unintended.

That's life. So we can get upset about that for a while. But we also, as we're planning, as we're interacting with our money, we need to know that best laid plans, you know, life is going to be lifey, So let's plan accordingly with the knowing so you don't get just so thrown off that things happen to everybody throughout your life. So can you plan everything with your money perfectly so that no matter what happens, it's not going to have any kind of negative impact.

No, you actually can't. So don't try. Don't try to do the impossible, which is making your money so buttoned up, so organized and planned that you believe that you're going to be you know, find them out what now you may be. You might have ten million dollars in the bank, which will probably set you up pretty well, and that's nothing wrong with that goal or more.

But life will will happen, and so just know, just you know, allow yourself to be a little flexible. Flexibility and adaptability and resilience no matter how great your plans. Those are three big keys to doing well in life, no matter what, and particularly with your money. So those are some practical things.

If you take nothing else away from today's show, I would say, you know you don't necessarily need more money. First, you need to be preparing yourself for more money. And that money will come so much more easily, It will flow right in if you're prepared. So prepare yourself for what you want.

Make sure that you are ready to receive. Make sure that you have set up the proper structures so that when you receive you can accept it. It can come on in whatever house you know you've set up for it. And just know that when you're prepared your commer you have less anxiety of less fear, you have more flexibility, more adaptability, You're able to create more stability in your life, and you're building confidence.

You're feeling more in control, and that's also where a lot of the anxiety comes from. It's just not feeling like you're in control. So Step one, work on your mindset, go to the last show and look at how to do that. And part two start working on these practical things so that you are fully prepared for financial success.

And I'm just telling you it's going to come to you so much more easily when you're prepared, as does anything. So please you know take this to heart. I will leave you some worksheets that can help you with this, and I have still a virtual coffee chat. You can go to my website limit FreeLife dot com and book a call with me.

We can spend twenty minutes just talking about even one aspect of this. If you're like I can't even get past the idea that I have this debt and I feel like I'll never get out of it, call me. We'll talk it through. It's the other thing that I say all the time for practical purposes, talk about money with people.

Not the wrong people there are you know who they are, the people you should not talk about your money with. But find people, sometimes people you don't know, but sometimes your financial advisors or accountants or you know, the people who have your back financially. Talk talk these things out. That's the other that when you hold them inside, like any other problem, they're not going anywhere.

They're festering, and they're going to pop back up there. It's like trying to hold a you know, a ball under the water. You can know it for a while, but you're going to lose strength at some point and that ball is going to pop right back up and that problem is going to show up again and throw you off your name. So really, it's really important to get help with your money, just like you do with everything else in life.

So all right, that's part two. There's part one and part two of getting prepared with your money readiness. Even if you just put a post it note on your computer that says, are you prepared financially? Keep asking yourself that question, what can I do to prepare better for my financial success?

That is on its way to me. That's a great question, powerful question. So keep asking those powerful questions, keep doing the work to prepare both mentally and practically. And you've got this.

Thanks so much. We'll see you next week on the Money and New Show. You can find us on all the podcast platforms and the Limit Free Life YouTube channel. Send me any comments, any requests, and reach out to me and Michelle at limitfreelife dot com or team at limit FreeLife dot com.

And again, go ahead and book a virtual coffee chat. It's free. It's not a sales call, it's a chance to get a question answered. Thanks so much, see you next week.