Take Your Financial Confidence to the Next Level

I share with you the framework needed to take your financial confidence to the next level.

• Identify your why and where you want to go.
• Understand where you are today.
• Fill your gaps and blindspots.
• Micro Goals
• Importance of believing you are capable of achieving your goals

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I think the first thing, and it's the first thing I always review with my clients when they're coming on board is what is actually important to you? What are your values? What are the cool things, the possibilities in the future that you really get excited about? Because without that, you're not going to do the hard work, you're not going to make the changes to your financial habits and do the necessary grind that you might have to do in order to achieve these goals. This is Techy Personal Finance Bootcamp, where I help tech professionals in their 20s and 30s build a great life today without sacrificing their future possibilities. I'm your host, Lucas Casares, certified financial planner and founder of Level Up Financial Planning, where I help educate, coach, and build strategies with my clients to help them take their financial confidence to the next level. Here's an important compliance disclosure. This podcast is for informational purposes only and are not to be considered recommendations. It is recommended you consult your trusted financial professional before implementing any information obtained from the Techie Personal Finance Boot Camp. Hello, thanks for joining Techie Personal Finance Bootcamp. I have a couple announcements before I dive into today's episode. So as you may have noticed, if you've been a listener for a while now, that I've been rotating the interviews and then these kind of more educational type uh episodes. For the end of the year, I've got a few uh interviews I need to catch up with and kind of push them out. I don't want to make uh the interviewees who I interviewed now sometimes a few months ago wait too much longer. So I'm actually gonna uh do a push towards these last few weeks of 2019, get them out. This will be the last educational, financially uh related topic um that you'll be seeing for 2019. But then what's gonna happen early in 2020 is I'm gonna release a handful of financial education based episodes so that you can kind of kick off 2020 pretty uh strong as far as the financial aspects. So we'll we'll talk about things like budgeting, uh debt management, and just kind of how to navigate getting your financial life in order. But before we do that and get into the new year, I'm gonna close this year out from the financial episodes with how to take your financial confidence to the next level. So if you're familiar with me at all, level up financial planning is the name of my financial planning company. And so I serve tech professionals there. And my kind of tagline is take your financial confidence to the next level. And I'm sure people get it. I I'm sure you understand that every day you can actually improve your life, whether it's financially or in any aspect, and just kind of constantly be leveling up. These things matter, they matter over time, they end up compounding to be significant increases and being substantially better off than where you started before you decided that you wanted to be more intentional about taking her financial confidence to the next level, or taking her health to the next level, or your career to the next level. All these things are decisions that you had to decide on that you want to actively engage and be proactive about what you want your life to look like, and then start doing the things that are actually gonna make a difference. But how how do you figure it out? So you might feel stuck, uh, you might just not even know where to get started. So that's what this episode's gonna help you with. So I think the first thing, and it's the first thing I always review with my clients when they're coming on board, is what is actually important to you? What are your values? What are the cool things, the possibilities in the future that you really get excited about? Because without that, you're not gonna do the the hard work, you're not gonna make the the changes to your financial habits and and do the necessary grind that that you might have to do in order to achieve these goals if you're not actually tying them to goals or anything important. It's not it's not enough to start January 1st, 2020 saying, you know what, I want to do better financially just to do better financially. It has to mean more than that, it has to be rooted in something that's super meaningful and super important to you. So that's that's step one, just getting clear on what's important to you and and what those possibilities are that you want to kind of strive for and actually be willing to put up with the little bit of pain that you're gonna feel uh early on at least. One thing that's cool about when you do start to make these changes, and you probably experience it in other aspects of your life where where you are strong, maybe you're really great at your career. That tends to be a lot of the people I work with were they're super engaged, they love the work that they do, and so they excel at it. And early on, it wasn't always the case though. They they they loved it even early on, but they struggled. There was huge things that they had to overcome and hurdles they had to overcome in order to get past that. And over time they got used to it. And as I know, especially with uh like coders and programmers and things like that, like you're just gonna be making stuff up, you're gonna be breaking things, you're gonna have to figure out stuff all the time. There it's always constantly new things that you have to learn, and you just kind of get used to that being your new normal. So the same thing happens with your financial habits, it it starts out a little bit uncomfortable, and and the best thing you can do is just kind of power through it. Once you start making that progress, it ends up helping dramatically. But once you do get clear on what's important to you, the the values and possibilities, then you have to figure out well, how how am I actually gonna connect the dots? How am I to get from where I'm at now to where I want to go? And first thing you have to do is figure out now where where are all my things at? Where are my resources? We'll dig into this more specifically at the start of 2020 when I drop a handful of those videos when we talk about net worth and just kind of understanding where you're at. But basically, you just kind of boil down where where are your resources, what are the liabilities, all the debts that you have to pay, the minimum payments, all these types of things. So, where are you at today? Uh, you need to know that in order to know how and where you're gonna go in the future. And so you you kind of have that vision of the future, what you want that to be like, what how awesome it could potentially be. Then you ground in reality, well, where am I today? And then you can start filling those gaps. And there's a few different ways you can do it. You if you're a do-it-yourselfer, and if you're listening to this for the financial episodes, maybe you are. Um find the information online, find it through podcasts, find it through blog posts. There's so many different ways. I think the biggest thing that you'll want to make sure that you're being careful with is making sure that it's a credible source that you're pulling from, because there are a lot of people who mean well, but they they just don't have all the information. They don't have enough perspective uh to say, hey, this is how I did it, and they're saying like this is the only way to do it, the the best thing since sliced bread, as far as that the way to process and think about your financial life. But that's not the case. There's so many different things that you can change and do different and still get to the same outcomes. And so that's one of the things I'm not too high on when it comes to someone that just managed to pay off debt, their student loans, or whatever, because they went through this one specific process. Your process is gonna look different, your roadmap is gonna look different. So just be wary of that when you're kind of researching stuff that sometimes their situation is not the same as your own. I I often tell myself this as well as clients as you have to run your own race. You we all started out with different resources, we all started out with different talents and strengths and weaknesses, and we have to figure it out. So uh you can do that, you can search those things. It is helpful to know what your tendencies are, where your weaknesses, where your strengths are, because if you know that a do-it-yourself approach just isn't gonna get you to where you need to be, well, why even start there? Um, especially when there's resources, you can get a financial coach, uh, you can get a financial planner. There's all different variations of ways that you can get some expertise and some assistance to kind of jumpstart your plan and just give you the groundwork. One of the things that I know my clients benefit from is like even though they're interested in some of these things, some of my clients are like really interested and actually are knowledgeable about it. But what it comes down to is there's still gaps, there's blind spots that they're not aware of, and oftentimes they're just not doing things efficiently. So you could be listening to this and be like, oh, I'm I'm actually feeling pretty good. I'm feeling pretty confident financially, but I almost guarantee that unless you're saving like 50% of your income, there's probably a few different ways you can optimize what you're doing now and actually improve your financial situation without really impacting your personal life or your lifestyle. And so that's just something I see all the time is people can be super confident in one aspect because you realize that you had to research this, but you're just not aware of all the other options and alternatives and all the different paths available to you. So getting a coach or a planner to kind of streamline this and say, hey, these are things that you should look at. These are the things that are important. So if you do want to research, I'm go focus on these things because there's so many different winding wormholes you can go down that are not going to be valuable to you or the time that you're gonna have to invest in these things. And so that could just be helpful, just giving you a clearer path of uh what education roadmap to even follow. So those are just kind of the the main alternatives. It's uh I guess the default alternative is just kind of figure it out. Don't don't look up anything online and just go by feeling in your gut as far as whether it makes sense uh to do uh X amount of dollars for a car payment, or uh when you have extra money and you got all these different things that you kind of had to weigh, which are gonna be like short-term goals, uh, auto loans, student loans, possibly buying a house, uh raising a family, should you do college $529 savings? Like all these things are huge, hugely important, but there's uh a process and probably a more efficient way to apply these things. And so if you're just going off your gut, you might be like, oh, I'll do it this way for a few months and then I'll switch it and rotate it, but that may not be the best thing. So uh getting clear and then getting that education however you get it so that you have confidence moving forward is gonna be huge. One thing it's important to remember too is there's there's obviously those longer terms, those huge goals, but then you need to break those things down because it's gonna be a long road. It's if you're running a marathon, you don't only count when you hit that marathon uh kind of mileage. You're checking in, you might have a smartwatch, you're gonna see different timers or markers along the the road, the the race that you're doing, where you're gonna see the just kind of the intervals like when where you're at and how you're doing well before then, and it kind of gives you like some motivation that like okay, I only have like five miles left or whatever. So you want to do the same thing with your financial goals is break those things down. Maybe you don't quite have an emergency savings uh built up, and typically it's three to six months of living expenses. That tends to be a lot more than people expect, and so that's a huge number. Like, let's break those things down smaller. Like, what would one month's uh living expenses look like, and how many, how long would it take you to get there? The cool thing about these shorter term goals is they can actually act like feel I actually feel short-term goals are more important than long-term goals because long-term goals tend to shift and change pretty often, actually. So, a lot of people don't realize that that you have your mindset on one thing, and then all of a sudden you you grow, you learn more, you experience more, and you decide that you know what, I thought I was gonna do it this way, and that's not as important anymore. And so I'm gonna shift those goals. But in the meantime, hopefully you were doing some cool things to gain either experience or gain confidence that you're doing the right things financially. And so, whatever that new goal is that's gonna replace that or kind of move up the priority list, you're that much closer and better for doing the smaller work, doing those small improvements to get to that big goal that's now changed. So it's important to make these goals smaller, uh, kind of like micro goals, and enjoy when you reach those uh achievements because they're important. And again, they just kind of act like a fuel or like a boost that one of the biggest things that a lot of people don't realize when they don't have a savings account or emergency savings is that it feels really good. And so you don't realize that until you actually start seeing it build up, and then it gets really hard to tap into it. So even if there's something like big coming up, you're like, I really don't want to see it go below $10,000 or whatever that is in your mind. Like once you've built it up, you really want to protect that emergency savings for only emergencies. And so it it's it's a cool thing that kind of changes and transitions, where maybe that person before would have just been like, uh, I don't have an emergency savings. If something comes up, I'll go to the credit card. Well, that's way worse than having emergency savings and needing to tap into emergency savings. But because of how we emotionally feel about those two different things, we're more willing to do something that's a way worse thing, which is going to credit card debt due to an emergency than just pulling out from your emergency savings that you worked hard to build up. So those are just a few examples of how you can start taking your financial competence to the next level. You're gonna want to get clear, you're gonna want to find out how to build that roadmap, and it could be education, could be reaching out to an expert. And um, I'm actually dropping my hourly services in 2020 just because my other business areas have grown. I've been doing this podcast, which I've been enjoying. So I'm really uh, and I'm launching a tax planning service too. So I'm super excited about those things. I'm dropping the hourly, unfortunately, but uh there's still a lot of planners out there that may be offering hourly services. So just do a Google search for a financial planner that works hourly. Financial coaches tend to not be uh as knowledgeable on like retirement planning, kind of long-term planning. But what financial coaches tend to be really good at is helping you figure out your cash flow, your budgeting, and stuff like that. So uh that would be something too that would be an option to look for. Maybe you don't need a full-fledged financial planner that knows different advanced strategies, you just need someone to help you figure out like what your finances are doing today. You can definitely look for a financial coach as well. So hopefully that information is helpful. I'm excited for 2020. Have a great end to 2019, enjoy the holidays however you choose to. Enjoy those. Remember to be present and focus on the cool stuff that you do have to be thankful for. And yeah, I think mindset is just such a big thing. If you've been listening to any of my interviews and the guests I've had for uh my show, like I I only pick people that I think are have a great vision and very optimistic as far as how they think about life. And it's because I feel it's important. Like if you think positive things, positive things are gonna happen, and you're just gonna be generally more happy if you're constantly focusing on the positive things. So I know that we're this financial episode isn't technically on that topic, but I just want you to remember that going into the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, and your your mindset is everything as far as if you want to be financially successful, if you want to achieve those goals and values that are important to you, well believe that it's possible, believe that you deserve deserve it, and then just go for it and and take that first step. You have to start. You can't wait around for some new event to kind of push you to get going. Like there's the event may never come or it may never be strong enough. So the only person that can actually motivate you to take those next steps is it's all inside yourself, it's inside your head, heart, however you want to kind of manifest it, but you can change the way you think and you can start going today. Have a great end of 2019. Thank you for listening to Tech E Personal Finance Bootcamp. Remember, if you like what you've been hearing, to subscribe, review, and share with your friends and colleagues. If you want to take your connection to the show to the next level, you can find me on LinkedIn or on Facebook. Hit me next time on Tech E Personal Finance Bootcamp.