Mike Michalowicz breaks down the four financial seasons from his book The Money Habit. Recovery means you have unsecured debt. Fund is when you're saving for something specific. Balance is living now while planning ahead. You move between them non-sequentially, not in a straight line.
You talk about different financial seasons, which makes sense. I also have no idea which one I'm in. Is there a simple way to figure out without overthinking? So there's 4 financial seasons I talk about in The Money Habit. To identify the season you're in is if you have debt that's in an unsecured state, you're in the recovery season. That's usually the lead indicator. When it comes to the fund season is that you see a future event of financial significance that you intentionally are preparing for. So if you're earning money during that period, you may actually be drawing it down from savings to support that funding moment. That's the activate season. And the last is the balance. The balance is that delicate chord, the delicate balance, striking that chord between living in the now, leveraging the funds that you do have to live fully as you define it, but also preparing for future events. So those are the seasons. We move from one to the other. We don't necessarily move in a sequence. I may be in the recovery season again. Life's events happen, but to realize that they're all simply events and it's a period of time and things transition on.
