The cobbler’s son has no shoes. The financial planner has no money.
Here’s where I went wrong last year…
Last year was a great year for Financial Zen.
Top line, it was our best year ever, and bottom line stayed steady with 2023 despite 2X bigger Cost of Services from a much larger payroll.
Still not bad.
Your boy Rick was saving a bunch of money each month….
…or so he thought.
After paying my taxes last week, it feels like flies are flying out of my outturned pockets.
Looking back, it’s easy to see what happened. Here’s what I did wrong.
1. I DIDN’T PUT MY OXYGEN MASK ON FIRST
We grew a ton last year. My day-to-day consists of preparing for, conducting and following up from back-to-back member meetings.
That left very little time or energy for me to do the things we do for our members for myself.
After all, I don’t pay myself to do that stuff for myself… oh wait. Now I see it. Of course I do.
I might not actually earn my hourly rate focusing on the Valenzi household, but if I had been focused on myself, I would have seen…
2. WHAT DOESN’T GET MEASURED, SPOILS
I reserve Saturdays for our personal finances. But that usually got pushed into Sundays because Saturdays turned into “catch-up days”.
And then when Sundays rolled around, I’d find a reason to push it off. “It’s just another week.” I’d tell myself.
As you know, we track our members’ take-home, spending and saving every month. Well, the last CashFLO update I did for MYSELF was last September.
If I had been watching, I would have seen our expenses creeping up.
Without the data, the self-limiter never turned on. All that money I was saving was blowing out the back window.
You can’t stack spent bills!
3. UNCLE SAM DOESN’T WANT YOU TO PAY ATTENTION
I didn’t do a single, solitary tax projection for my household last year.
So while Financial Zen was helping members adjust withholding, pay estimates and set expectations, my personal tax projections grew moss.
And I paid the price with a much larger tax bill than my mental math calculated, including a hefty underpayment penalty.
4. EATING HIGH ON THE HOG
You may have noticed that eating out ain’t cheap these days.
A shared app, two entrees and a couple of drinks average $150 these days.
And I was not afraid of a little restaurant therapy. Bad day? Eat out! Good day? Eat out! Warm weather? Eat out! Cold weather? Door Dash!
After cleaning up our expenses, I double-clicked into where it was all going. We had a lavish trip to Italy, but second to that was just eating restaurant food.
Like an EMBARASSING amount. While I was patting myself on the back for never eating lunch out, I was spending 3X that on dinners out.
HOW TO FIX IT
If I had been watching the house, I would have gotten in front of all this. Instead of lamenting what I did, I’d be changing what I do.
So from now on, I’m going to put MY mask on first.
Monday mornings will start with an hour taking care of MY MONEY for the same reason I now work out at oh-dark-thirty.
Doing your first priority first is the only way to ensure it gets done.
And that will be worth way more than my hourly rate.
