A short motivational YouTube talk by Louis Barajas (Jan 10, 2025) introducing a "financial mindset staircase" that describes progressive financial stages—from survival and struggle, through stability and success, to "financial greatness" (purpose-driven use of money). The presenter frames mindset as the core barrier to lasting financial change and previews ongoing coaching content to help viewers move upward toward financial significance.
Chapters
Welcome back, everybody. This is Luis Barajas, your financial life healer. And we're going to start off the brand new 2025 with focusing on your financial mindset. And I've been doing this work for the last 30 years and I realized that no much, no matter how much financial literacy I teach you, if I don't have you in the right mindset, you'll always sabotage yourself and end up going back to where you started from. And so that's not the goal. The goal for 2025 is for us to continue growing and growing up here and the way we look at things, the way we see things. So I want to talk to you about the financial mindset staircase that, that I've created. So let's start off with the different levels of where people tend to be in life, right? And so there's going to be people that are in the survival stage. And in the survival stage, this is where people are right now. Maybe not living paycheck to paycheck, but I mean, they're probably, you know, you know, one paycheck away from, you know, moving into their car because they don't have enough to pay for rent or they're living in a shelter or they're really struggling. I mean, they're, they're in that survival stage where I always say, you know, you can go to church and pray, but you come out, if you have to feed your kids, you'll still food to feed your kids. And, and it's, it's a terrible place to be. And then there's the next stage where we see a lot of Americans in lower income areas that they're in the struggle stage. They are living paycheck to paycheck. Sometimes they're a month behind on their rent.
They don't have any emergency reserves, they get into some financial pickle and they don't even have a hundred or two hundred dollars in the bank. They are relying on their credit or credit cards. Some of them people have already lost their credit cards because they just have so much debt. And then there's the next level of people we're currently right now in the United States that are what I call the stability stage. They are have a decent job, earning a decent income, still living paycheck to paycheck. I call it the stability stage, you know, but there's not much money left at the end of the month, right? They're not taking the fancy vacations, but they do have a decent car. And again, that switches most America, right? Middle America right now, where most People are at. And then some people fortunately, you know, go to good schools or start their own business and have success, financial success. They are not living paycheck to paycheck. They have some money in emergency reserves. They're putting money away for the kids college education, they're putting money away for the retirement. And is what, you know, we consider people who have success, the mass affluent in the United States. There's a lot of people, these are the people that actually a lot of financial planners that the financial planning industry goes and wants to work with. Right. They're not really focusing on these stages down here, the success stage. But my life has been working with people at all levels and I have worked with people who have reached a really high level of success where they actually do have sometimes millions of dollars in the bank. And the most common theme of what I hear with people who have reached this level of success is is this all there is? They expected that when they had the nice car, they had the nice house, they had the family, they traveled to Europe that they would be fulfilled, that something in them would say, you know, I've made it, I don't need anything else. But people still sometimes feel empty because at the end of the day, it's never about material success. We're talking about building what I call financial greatness or financial significance. And financial greatness is having purpose, meaning you're using your money to live a better quality of life, you're helping others. And so the goal is always that you're striving is to have some significance in your life, which I have titled financial greatness. So whether you're here, here, here, here, we're always trying to at some point because this is, we know where you're living on purpose. You've got meaning and you know that you realize that the material things in life are just not that important. Okay, so all the coaching that we're going to be doing through the rest of this year is to take you through up here and help you reach in your life. So stay tuned for further content from me regarding financial greatness.
