Make A Habit Of Controlling Your Finances! | TJ WALKER | THE HABIT INFLUENCER™️

This is a story, and I placed an image to it in the show Notes that gives what I think are fairly standard tips about good financial practices. I want to add in some of my own perspectives on this as well. So tip number one, make a budget. You can't stick to a budget if you don't have one. It's critically important to understand how much money is coming in and how much is going out. Now, folks, let me say as a caveat, I'm not one of these personal development guys who comes on and says, oh, I'm gonna make you so rich. I'm the richest guy in the world. Look at my 10 cars and my four swimming pools. And if you just buy my program for $33,000, I'm gonna make you a billionaire in a week. I'm not that kind of personal development guru, okay? I don't think there's any one magic amount of money that everyone needs. I think you need to have the amount of money you need to live the life that you want, to take care of the material needs that you have, and to not worry about money. Money is not the root of all evil, but it's also not the root of all happiness either. And it's not the solution to all your problems. Not having enough money does cause a lot of stress. Having too much money can cause stress, too. But not having enough money can cause a tremendous amount of stress in everyone's life. So that's why I think it is important to figure out how you can reach the financial status you want to accomplish what you need. So I want to go over these tips within that overall framework. Tip number two, check yourself. Set a dollar amount that will cause you to step back. Could be $5, could be $100. But anytime you're tempted to buy something on Amazon and it's 150 bucks and you've told yourself, I'm really going to hold back if it's more than 100 bucks. Really force yourself to scrutinize it. Ask yourself, do you really have to have it? Sometimes it's good to put a 24 hour or 48 hour hold on. Because sometimes you get so excited about something and you think, well, I want this right away. If you just didn't buy it for two days, chances are you might forget it. I know I did that a couple of years ago. I got all excited about an air fryer. Oh, it's going to be so much healthier. And my daughter, who loves french fries, will eat all these healthy potato fries with no grease. I bought the thing and we used it once. Had I simply followed this technique of don't buy it for two days, probably wouldn't have bought it. So that's tip number two. Tip number three, automate savings. Make sure that some amount of money from each paycheck automatically gets transferred into a Savings account, a 401k, whatever the investment vehicle is in your country that allows you to invest for retirement in a tax free manner. Most countries have that. And you need some money on a rainy day fund in case your car breaks down, the refrigerator breaks. That's something important. Tip number four, pick an expense to eliminate. Everybody makes dumb purchases from time to time. I don't make that many purchases these days, other than a lot of books, technical equipment to share with you, but I still make some dumb expenses. Absolutely know about it, everyone does. And it could be something small like bottled water. Now, in some parts of the world, okay, you do need to drink bottled water in huge portions of the world, the United States, Europe, bottled water is actually less pure, less filtered than what's coming out of your tap. It costs more, it's wasting money and it is absolutely horrible for the environment, which is a whole separate issue. But that's an area where you can save money. Think about regular purchases that make you happy but don't necessarily cost a lot of money. And get rid of the ones that don't make you that happy, especially if they're costing a lot of money. The next tip, learn to say no. Just because you have the money doesn't mean you have to spend it all. It's okay to say I can't afford it or I don't want it. That's the best solution of all, to simply say I don't want it. You've got to plan for your long term financial health because you can't necessarily depend on your government to do so. You can't necessarily depend on family, necessarily. So these are some tips from a well known financial expert. I've put a link to it in the show Notes. Happy to hear your thoughts too. I want to add on to that because finance to me is one of the seven pillars. When you're looking at your life, when you're trying to plot out the habits you want for a fulfilled life, finance is not the most important. I don't even think it's the second most important. But I do think as a broad category of life, finance is one of the seven most important things you really have to plan, think about and orient your habits towards. And if you do it right. It makes so many other things in life go well. It smooths the path for so many other things that could lead to fulfillment. If you don't do it right, it causes so many other if you don't have money, then you don't have enough for healthy food, then you don't have enough for proper medical attention, then you don't have enough for fun. Not that all fun requires money, but a lot of it does. If you like to travel, vacation, see a movie, those things are not free. The best things in life, really, spending quality time with friends and family can be free. But if you live in other cities, you got to fly there. If everyone else in your family is taking a vacation and you can't afford to go with them, it's not a good feeling. I've been there in the past, fortunately, the relatively distant path, but I have been there in that situation. It's not fun. The thing I want to add to this, when it comes to finances, that I think is even more important than making a budget and paying yourself first is constantly investing in yourself and creating things on a daily basis. This morning at 5:30am I wrote 500 words about habits. I don't know when I'll make money from that, but I'm pretty sure at some point, whether it goes into a book that I make money on from selling, whether it goes into an online course that I sell, whether whether it goes onto a blog where I get advertising revenue, whether it's a part of show where there's advertising revenue, I'll be making money from that. That's not why I did it. I did it because I had a burning passion to communicate ideas on how I want to live my own life, how I want to improve my own habits. And it's something that interests me. Do I like money? Sure. But by focusing on something I have a passion for and creating that was fun in and of itself, the fact that I'm going to be able to monetize it in a bunch of different ways, that's gravy. That's fine. And to me, that is the number one secret of people who are really financially successful. They figured out how to channel what it is they love doing and they create more of it. And because of that, they're able to make money from it. And after a while, your hobby and your profession can meld together. Now, that doesn't mean everything has to be about work. As you've heard me say, I play tennis and I lost in tennis Sunday and I can't wait to play next Sunday to try to avenge my loss. And I'll never make a penny from playing tennis. So not everything in life has to be about money. But I do think that for people who really care about their finances, spending some of your time every day creating, writing as Peggy's doing, making videos as Sy's doing, creating online courses, as you do that, and you're spending time on your passion, and your passion also makes you money, your finances will take care of themselves pretty quickly. Because if you're spending your time creating for others, it's often not that expensive, unless you're making sculptures out of solid gold. The infrastructure these days, the raw materials of creation are not that expensive. Even making a movie can cost 10% of what it used to cost 20, 30 years ago. So that the cost, the means of production to create have gone down, down, down. These days, you can be a writer and not even have to buy paper. You can do everything on a laptop, a cell phone. And by channeling your energies in creation, you can enhance your own financial position. You can make more money. And I'm going to use a term, I would caution you most of the time when you hear people say this phrase, run, grab onto your wallet, someone's trying to steal from you. But I'll use this phrase, and I don't like to use this phrase. I don't like it when I hear personal development, people talk about it, but the phrase is passive income. Most of the time when people say that, they're scamming you. But it is possible if you are creating and you create long enough and you're good enough at it, and you learn from it, to make passive income from your books, your online courses, your software programs, other things you create. That's, to me, a fantastic way of ensuring your financial health. More so than just sticking a budget and saying, oh, I was only supposed to spend $300 on restaurants this month and I spent $342, that's a problem. I don't like to. To be honest with you, I don't budget that way. What I try to do is simply make a lot more money each month than I spend. And I realize not everyone can do that, and I did not do that for most of my life, but by following the principles that I talk about here in the course, it has allowed me to do that. And that's what I want to share with you as well.