We all deserve to live a rich life. We all deserve to achieve financial success (whatever that means to you).

And we all do things every day to get in the way of reaching our financial goals and living a rich life.

In this episode of the #RichLifeLawyer Show we’re going to talk about three ways you are sabotaging your financial success.

What Does this Have to do with Estate Planning Lawyers?

That’s a great question.

No, we are not financial planners.

No, we do not help people get rich literally.

But, as estate planning lawyers we do love it when our clients have wealth both to live on now and to give to their family when they pass on. Getting “rich” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but life is so much more fun when you don’t have to worry about paying the bills.

At CMS Law Firm we want all of our clients to become rich. The best way to do that is to help you figure out the small mistakes you are making that, if fixed, can lead to huge payoffs.

Three Ways You are Sabotaging Your Financial Success

As always, if you want to know exactly what I’m talking about when it comes to this list, you are going to have to watch the video (just click the play button above – it only takes 5 minutes).

And, if you want to know how to avoid making these mistakes, you should definitely listen to the video (or, if you don’t have time, scroll to the bottom for the transcript).

These are three ways you are sabotaging your financial success:

1. Not tracking what your spending;
2. Failing to automate your finances; and
3. Goal setting (or lack thereof).

If you make any progress in these three areas I guarantee you will see a significant increase in your net worth and significant toward living the life of your dreams.

Question of the show: What is your number one goal that you can wrap these financial lessons around?

Cheers,

Christopher Small

P.S. Do you have kids? Have you completed guardianship paperwork? Have you done it correctly? Click here to find out what happens if you don’t do anything: Are you okay with a judge choosing the guardians of your children?

P.P.S. Do you own a business? Do you have a plan so the business, and your family, can survive if something happens to you? If not, click here to learn how simple it is to protect your business and your family from tragedy: 5 Ways to Protect Your Business from Catastrophic Failure.

P.P.S. Do you have no kids and think you don’t need an estate plan? Single and think a will is only for married couples. You couldn’t be more wrong. Click here to learn more: 5 reasons estate planning is a must have even if you don’t have kids.

Christopher Small is a Kirkland estate planning attorney who helps people get rich and live forever. He is also the owner of CMS Law Firm LLC.

Transcript

Hey everybody this is Christopher Small, this is episode number three of the Rich Life Lawyer Show. I’m excited to be here with you today as always.

Excited to talk about this topic because it’s something that you know I did for a long time. It’s something that I’ve seen other people do, my family, and my friends for long time and I wanna talk to you about it so that you can stop sabotaging your financial success, right?

You, just like everyone else, you have the ability and the right to become wealthy, to generate wealth, to leave your family wealth, to live well yourself.

All it takes is a couple of basic ideas and fundamentals that many of us don’t follow that sabotage our success. So let’s talk about this real quick.

The first way you are sabotaging your financial success is not tracking what you’re doing. And I’m not talking about creating a budget necessarily. I tell you, I don’t have a budget. Like I don’t have a “spend x dollars on restaurants this month.” I don’t have a budget like that, but I can tell you where my money is going.

I know that let’s say 10% is going straight to a savings account. I know that 25% is allocated to bills every month. I know where these are going because I’m tracking my money. I know that I’m putting away 10% into a vacation fund. I know that I’m putting 10% into a college fund.

I know where my money is going and I’m tracking where that’s going so that I can be aware of what I’m doing with my money. Because sometimes what I’ll do is, when I look back and I am tracking, I’ll say “Gosh, you know, we’re starting to spend a lot of money here and we’re not really getting a lot of value out of it, I don’t know why we necessarily we’re doing this but maybe we wanna go over here in this direction, you know?”

But if you’re not tracking, if you’re not looking at what you’re doing, then, you’re never going know and you’re never going be able to adjust course.

The second way that you’re sabotaging your financial success is not automating.

Don’t leave your financial success up to your will power because you will lose.

We all know what it’s like to walk through a store, a grocery store for example, when you’re hungry. What happens? You start buying all kinds of craziness. You know, give me the ho hos, give me the ice cream, give me the roasted chicken, whatever it is that you really like, you know, give me those potato chips.

That is the same thing that happens to you everyday when you see money in your account. You know I can tell you that for my wife, Alison I love you, this happens to her sometimes right? She just sees that we have money in the account and that she can’t help but go and just buy something.

And it’s typically not something that’s expensive. She’s not wasting our money, but it’s so much easier not to feel that pull and that drive to do that when the money’s not there.

So how do you do this? How do you automate?

Go to your employer, or if you’re an employer, you can just set this up. You have direct deposit for your check every month. What you’re gonna tell your direct deposit, your payroll person like HR, whatever is that I have, let’s say I have a hundred dollars a check, that’s what I get every two weeks, a hundred bucks. I want to send ten dollars automatically to account A, I want to send ten dollars automatically to account B, I want to send fifty dollars to account C, just like that.

You want to have an expenses account and a savings account that you can then sort of divide after that. You say “I want to send fifty dollars to account A, I want to send fifty dollars to account B,” and then with those accounts you spread it out too.

You basically set it up so that you don’t have to do anything, it happens automatically. And that is where you can accumulate significant growth. That’s why I have setup.

Every two weeks, we get paid every two weeks or so, every two weeks we get money that gets pulled out and it goes all these different directions. All these different things I was talking to you about earlier.

The third thing and the final thing, and maybe the most important thing when it comes to sabotaging your financial success, is goal setting or lack of goal setting.

It’s impossible to get where you want to go if you haven’t mapped that out and thought about that.

You know when I talk about goal setting, I’m not talking about “I want to save a million dollars.” That is a goal that is not attainable. What I mean is, it’s not grounded enough in your reality for it to be important to you.

What is important to me for example, one of my goals, my goal is to be able to retire and live comfortably for the rest of my life.

My goal is to be able to send my kids to college or to fund a business that they want to pursue without having to take any loans or to incur any financial hardship.

My goal is to, if I die, know that my family is set up financially and emotionally so that they would be able to carry on and live out their best lives when I’m gone.

That is goal setting. That where you could say, “Look, I know that this ten percent of my income is going away every month into this random account to be used later because it is building towards my dream. That is the easiest way to goal set or that is the easiest way reach goals, that is the easiest way to save money, to build wealth is to have this bigger “why” surrounding what you’re doing not just money.

Money is, I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day, he’s a financial planner and he was telling me some study or some, there’s some term for it where outside of three years, money has no intrinsic meaning in our brains.

For whatever reason, we can’t process it, so you have to goal set based on these other things that are really important to you: family; lifestyle; etc.

It could be any of these things, but it’s not the money itself. It’s not that number.

So stop sabotaging yourself, start goal setting.

One other thing I want to do now moving forward, I wanna end the show asking you for a question or asking a question and asking you for a comment, right? And I think what I want to know for today is: What is your number one goal that you can wrap these financial lessons around?

What is your big dream? What do you want to do that’s going to take some money.

Answer that below in the comments, no matter where. If you’re on Facebook, answer below. If you’re on Youtube, answer below. If you’re on our website, Richlifelawyer.com, answer below. And I’d love to hear those, I’m gonna respond and look at them. I really wanna know what your dreams are. So, do that and I’ll catch you later.