What is Stopping You from being Financially Free?

Since starting in the Financial Planning profession and working as a client relationship manager, there has been a lot of learnings. You can learn a lot about the technical side of Superannuation, Estate planning, Retirement, Investing, Trust structures, Business/Companies, Budgeting and Cashflow projections…

All are really valid and great to know, however, there is no point learning all of that if you don’t understand how money and your everyday to day behaviour is interconnected. Locked together in a constant battle of wills, discipline and decision making that over a lifetime can lead to Financial Freedom and a great retirement or can lead to living off the age pension and counting your pennies everyday.

Everyone of course wants the Financial Freedom and the ability to do whatever you want, but not everyone is going to get there…

Therefore, today I want to share with you the top tips to attaining financial freedom and being able to significantly change your life at the same time!

And also explain why you have not attained Financial Freedom yet….

Understand the Past to Create the Future You DESIRE!

The key to unlocking your potential, as corny as it sounds, is to understanding your past and what behaviours you picked up from your upbringing. Most psychologists today are learning more and more about how our upbringing and the way our parents treated us truly affects how we behave when it comes to money decisions, and life in general.

The understanding of a psychologist who studies the evolutionary theory, is that we are born with 50% of our behaviours already embedded in our DNA. Therefore, we have no control over some aspects of our life, which makes it even more important for you to understand your strengths and weaknesses.

25-30% of our behaviours come from our upbringing, between the ages of 0-6 years old, where our brains were the most malleable or think of our brains as sponges that were prone to taking in everything from our environment.

The other 20-25% comes from our peers and social groups, where we try to fit in and mould into a group that we can connect with and find purpose.

If we were to take the idea of evolutionary psychology and put it into effect, it makes it even more important for you to understand how your parents view money and whether you are a spender or saver.

Hence, you need to really look back at your upbringing, ask your parents or look back into the past and ask yourself, what is money to me?

Do I save up every penny? Or do I spend most of my money? (If you are like the 80-85% of us, you are a spender, so don’t feel bad if you are)

Did my parents complain about money or see it as “Bad”? Do I?

Were my parents comfortable with debt or were they always stressed about the mortgage? Do you find yourself also becoming stressed?

What was your first money memory? Was it of piggy banks and saving to buy your first toy? Or were you given everything?

There is no right or wrong answers here, you should not feel guilty about your upbringing or blame your parents for the way you are now, although there is partial responsibility on their part.

What you need to do is start to understand your past, and start to understand that you can make life easier by setting up a plan based on your behaviours and how you view money now. The key is to become aware of your own behaviours, to stop and reflect, which is difficult at first, but like anything, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Having a VISION of what your FUTURE is like and bring your PARTNER along for the journey!

It may sound a bit corny again, but truly having a vision of what your future looks like, even tastes, smells, sounds and feels like, is going to make it way more likely for you to succeed.

Once you have an understanding of your past, you need to set your eyes to the future, and you need to truly envision what it will be like in 1, 3, 5, 10 or even 20 years.

For most people, you don’t think all that often in the future tense, biologically, we are more adept at surviving in the here and now, therefore most of us will always be thinking in past or present tense. But, for true financial freedom, there is a necessity to think about the future.

Therefore, to buck the trend, to “escape the rat race,” you need to do what most people are not.

One of my favourite exercises to do which will help you to envision your future is to ask yourself, “what is a day in the life [insert your own name here] in 12 months time?”

**Remember, there are no right or wrong answers, it needs to be reasonable, but let your imagination take effect here. What does your morning look like? What are you doing throughout the day? Who are you with? Where are you going and where do you live?

Take at least 15 minutes to type or write this down, my preference is to write as you are more likely again to achieve this if you physically write it down. You are taking it from your minds eye to a physical manifestation in written form.

The key to this is to do it multiple times, to live it in your minds eye and to describe it as accurately as possible. You will find it difficult at the beginning, however with practise, it will become easier and easier. Or, if you are not a visionary and it is not a strength of yours, ask your partner to help you and to build a vision together.

If you do not have a partner, discuss it with friends or family, someone you can truly open up to and let it all out.

Create a SYSTEM and have the DISCIPLINE to stick to it!

Once you have an understanding of your behaviours and what you actually you want to achieve, you can look to breaking it down into manageable steps to getting you to that overall vision.

The best way to do this is to find someone who has done what you want to achieve previously, which I can guarantee there is someone out there who has achieved your vision of life.

Otherwise, talk to a professional, someone who lives and breathes helping people to live their goals and vision of the future everyday.

Either of these people will be able to help you formulate a system, however if you want to do it yourself, you can always look to creating your own systems.

You can do this by simply doing what I call reverse engineering, where you make your vision and create a goal around that vision. An example is you may want to be financially free and for you to do that you need to earn at least $90,000 per annum.

How do you get to $90,000 per annum from a mix of passive and active income streams? Where will it come from essentially?

Investments? Property? A business? A YouTube/podcast channel?

There are multiple ways you can do it, it all depends on your vision and understanding yourself, how you behave and what your strengths are!

Once you have the vehicle (investments/business, property etc.), you can step out goals to work on everyday to help you bring your vision to life.

That system may mean that you set up your bank accounts correctly, automating your savings so when your pay goes in, your savings goes out to another account, maybe even at a different bank.

The system could be simply you sit down every two weeks to revise your budget and spending, understanding where you money is going. Or getting your partner to do it, because they may be better at it then you.

Once you have set up a system, you just need to keep doing it, week in, week out. Having the discipline to make sure that it is on track by reviewing it and setting little milestones in which you can celebrate once you hit them.

A great way to make sure that you are keeping on track is to talk to someone, a partner or professional, who will keep you accountable. The power of telling someone you are going to do something is significant in helping you to living the vision you wrote down, just having someone to be there when it gets tough or discipline wanes. It is very underrated in our current society anyhow.

If Financial Freedom comes down to only three things, why don’t you have it in the first place?

Because most people get stuck in the day to day, they forget about their dreams and visions they had as a child growing up, they forget about being curious and don’t have time to reflect.

They grow content and settle for what they have, which is fine, if you are happy and living the life you want to live, but most people are not!

The other reason is simply because financial freedom takes TIME!

You need to have PATIENCE, and do what my wife calls “building your empire.” We live in such a fast pace society that we forget we have 90-100 years of life in us, not everything is going to come to you straight away and sometimes takes years if not decades of work and perseverance.

Hopefully this has effected you in a way that you will stop and think a little bit about your own life and where that is going.

But until next time,

Take Back Control