Oct 11
3
Think Flow and Grow
Many women over fifty are struggling get back on track to reach their financial goals. Sometimes it’s hard to see the first step, especially when it seems like such an overwhelming project. Actually, the first step to growing your money is a simple, but not always easy one; it’s creating sustainable, positive cash flow.
Create a simple structure that makes it easy for you to do a monthly cash flow calculation for your family or household outlining money flowing in and out of your accounts. You’ll begin to take more notice that your daily money habits really do make a difference in reaching your long term financial goals.
Think of your own household as a little business, where everyone should focus on its financial well-being. Think of yourself as CEO of that business; your job is to make sure that the company not only operates at a profit, but also creates and expands capital. Capital is the savings that you accumulate to invest that will compound and grow. It is increased by saving more than you spend, and can be accomplished by increasing income, spending less, or both.
Increasing income tends to be more fun, and it certainly has more upside. You can only reduce your spending so much. It’s not much fun to reduce spending, but it sure is fun to have positive cash flow. Not only that, often spending can be easily reduced just by bringing awareness to it; sometimes we just need to pay more attention to what we are spending, and why and how we are spending our money. And this takes us right back to tracking our cash flow.
Your ultimate objective is to reach your financial goals, which will allow you to achieve what you defined as those things that are important to you, or what I call your money reasons. Your money reasons will, of course, allow you to create the life that you want. And that’s a pretty important mission!
