Rewriting Your Money Story

Hey guys! I just wanted to pop in today and share with you real quick, because there is a free course launching tomorrow (21st Nov at 10am Brisbane time), designed to help you create your new money story!

Last month in the Healthstyle Emporium, our clients got access to a brand new webinar, "5 Steps to Diminish Financial Stress." As part of our 16 week program, new webinars are recorded almost every month, and all the recordings are available on our platform for any active client to go and listen to whenever they want! But the really special thing about this webinar is that for a limited time, anyone can access it, and it's attached to a 5 day free course, which starts tomorrow, which will never be offered for free again! So I wanted to share my top takeaways from the webinar, and why I'm super excited to rewrite my money story over the next 5 days! You can check out the webinar for yourself and register to the course here. (P.s. I'm not sure how much longer this link will be active for, so get in quick!) Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, I'm just sharing what I've learnt, and whatever tips you decide to implement from this blog or the webinar is completely up to you! Financial health is so important because stress plays a massive role in our overall health and wellbeing, and ongoing financial stress can not only lead to mental health concerns or relationship breakdowns, but real, physical health problems too! Most people would attribute financial stress to things like depression and anxiety, leading to substance abuse like alcoholism, or breakups and divorce; but did you know that ongoing financial pressure has also been linked to high blood pressure, diabetes, migraines, and heart problems, to name a few. And these can be caused by any kind of stress, but financial stress is the most common in our modern world, specifically in 2020! The webinar is broken down into 5 steps; actionable things that you can implement straight away to heal your relationship with your finances! Step One, is create a new money story. A lot of us are brought up with self limiting beliefs around money: "money doesn't grow on trees," "I'm not made of money," "there's never enough money," etc. Sound familiar? These beliefs can be buried in our subconscious from things we heard as a kid, and we don't even realise how they are affecting our relationship with money as an adult! So the first step is to figure out your money story, ask yourself if it's serving you or holding you back, and then rewrite it! If you're like me, you will need a little help with this! So see the link above to sign up for the free course to rewrite your story! (I may have to edit this blog in the future, if the course turns into a paid course!) Step Two is work out your expenses! Take your bank statements from the past year and map out your expenses. What are your regular bills? What are incidental expenses that came up through the year that you don't pay regularly? Gifts? Splurge? Calculate all your expenses for the year, and then divide that amount by how often you get paid - ie. Weekly, divide by 52. Monthly, by 12, etc. How does that amount compare to the wage you have coming in each pay!? If it is more than you earn, then you are living outside your means and you may need to find expenses you can cut out. Breaking it down like this will give you a clearer picture of where your money is going, what's important, what's necessary, and what's a leaking tap! You may also choose to set up separate bank accounts for regular bills, incidental expenses, gifts, etc, so that you can divide your pay into these expense accounts each pay run and know that you have enough to cover each category throughout the whole year! Step Three is pay yourself! Your self esteem has a direct reflection on your financial state; your self worth = your net worth! As your self worth improves, your net worth will become more abundant also. Figure out a weekly amount that comfortably covers your expenses, but also is affordable to you; $50-100/week might be a good starting point; then pay yourself that much each week! This money is just for yourself, not for shouting someone else's meal, not for buying your partner a gift, just for you. This allows you to look after yourself and therefore increase your self worth! It allows you to get a coffee with a friend, buy a new dress, get your hair or nails done, without having to quibble the cost! Financial literacy is about disclipine - pick an amount and stick to it, don't change it week to week, and don't take this money and use it for something else! It must be used for you, remember self worth = net worth. If you're not valuing yourself, neither will your money! Step Four is savings! Set up different savings accounts and set goals for how much you're going to save. For example, if you're planning a snow trip for next winter, work out how much you will need to have put aside for your holiday, and divide it by how many months until you leave - then you know exactly how much you need to put into your travel account each month to have enough to go on your holiday! It works the same for purchasing a car or saving for a house deposit! Work out how much you need by when, and reverse engineer it to make sure you're saving enough to reach your goal. Having separate savings accounts for different goals and sticking to those goals requires discipline; remember you will always attract what you are disciplined and capable enough to handle! If you can't handle what you currently have, there will be no more coming your way until you do! (Side note, if your bank charges account fees for multiple accounts, switch banks! There are so many good banks out there without needing to pay monthly fees!) Step Five is set up a do not touch account!! If you've read The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape, this is your MOJO account - this is emergency money, the money you live off if you lose your job in a global pandemic, or your house burns down, or you get injured and can't work. The idea is to keep this account with at least 3 months worth of pay in it at any one time - for example if you earn $52000 per year, you would want that account to be at $13000 or higher. To put money in this account, you must save 10% of every income you get! So if you earn $1000/week, $100 of that goes into the do not touch account! If 10% is too high, work out what is affordable for you right now, (remember you will work out all you expenses and know what's leftover!), maybe you can only put aside 5% to begin with; but grow that amount! Every quarter, increase it by 10% - so 10% of 10% is one percent, therefore you'll put aside 11% the second quarter, and 12.1% the third quarter, and so on and so on. These incremental increases will improve your self worth soo much, because you'll see your do not touch account growing and growing, but you're not noticing the extra little bit leaving your account each pay run! And be patient. Healing your finances won't happen overnight, but it has a long term reward; the master passes up short term satisfaction for long term gain! So that's my takeaways from the webinar, maybe you can see why I'm so excited to delve into the course! I wanted to share a little bit of my money story and why I'm keen to rewrite it. Growing up, my family was never rich, but we always had enough. We would always have packed lunch rather than tuckshop, we always got nice presents at birthdays and Christmas, but never really in between. I never really heard a lot of negativity around money, but it was really instilled in me that you have to work hard for money and you have to really earn it; cue the hard physical work where I'm sweating it out in return for my daily wage! And there's nothing wrong with that, it made me careful with my money and I'm grateful that I've never got myself into any silly financial positions because of that view. But, there's more to life than slogging it out for a buck; ringer for a dollar and all that! And that's why I'm grateful for my online business because it's showing me that I can earn an income without sweating, and proving the power of residual income - money you continue to earn after the work is done! I think one of the biggest challenges I had around money was when I got married - I come from a house where you work hard for money and you're careful with money, but if you can afford something, you've earned the right to have it! Also, my mum and dad were both very hands on in the financial side of their businesses, it was never left up to one or the other. My hubby's family has a significant property debt, and although they never went without as kids, there was always a shadow of there's not enough money, we can't afford that, and also the value of needing to work hard to earn money, to struggle to make ends meet; on top of that, the finances are left completely up to my mother in law! So my hubby has the belief that managing money is the woman's job, whereas I came to the relationship believing that it should be a shared responsibility! Can you see where I'm going with this!? So there comes a point where I'm in charge of the money, but I'm criticised for spending too much - or he thinks I'm spending more than I actually am. When we sat down to do our expenses for the bank when we applied for our loan, he was surprised to find that he spends as much on 10 working dogs as I do on 5 horses; that he spends more on his light aircraft than I do on breeding my horses; and that I wasn't spending nearly as much on groceries as he accused me of when the spending account got lower than expected! (News flash, the money went to the plane!) These kinds of arguments really affect my money story, and I find myself more and more in that scarcity mindset, even though I earn the money too, it's mine to spend as well! So I'm ready for a rewrite, to become my own author again, instead of having a co-author in my own story! Hopefully I'll have another blog to share after the course, but that's all for now! This webinar is just a little glimpse of what we have access to inside the Healthstyle Emporium's 16 week program, so if you'd like to learn more, or get yourself involved, please don't hesitate to reach out!