2 Financial Principles to Help you Survive Any Life Transition
Major life transitions, such as moving to a new city, becoming a parent, retiring, graduating from college or changing jobs, can be an exciting and invigorating part of life. Yet transitions, even happy ones, can be stressful and bring up mixed feelings, as well as get you feeling financially confused.
Regardless of what life brings your way, I would like you to always remember these 2 principles:
Principle #1: Pay Yourself First
This simple, yet very powerful concept of “Paying yourself first” is something you need to drill into your head! There is no other way to succeed. Once you make more money, there will be lots of temptations. Look around and explore how successful people treat their money.
Paying yourself first means that once you get a paycheck, the first person on your list to get paid should be YOU. That’s right. YOU. Not your cell phone company or landlord or your other bills…it’s YOU. That means you have to start saving.
We talked about starting a Curveball account for emergencies. That’s an example of paying yourself first.
At some point, your Curveball account will be fully funded and you’ll begin focusing on saving for other goals (such as buying a car or taking a vacation).
Having this mentality in place, will help you go thru changes in life with a much more confident approach. Because now you will be looking at any situation you face with these questions in your mind: “What’s in it for me? Can I pay myself first?”. Wouldn’t you agree that this is a much more powerful position to be in? I would!
Principle #2: Focus on Income – “Side Hustle”
In a nutshell, it is wise to look at your skill set, be sure to sharpen your skills often to stay in demand, and rely on yourself, as opposed to your employer, to ensure that you are financially sound.
SO, how do you put this into practice? Short answer. You take advantage of all of the opportunities provided to you by the Internet. In other words, you need to ‘Get Your Side Hustle On!’
For example, if you are a graphic designer or a writer by day, nothing prevents you from using your skills after 5PM on a site like www.Fiverr.com, www.Upwork.com or www.TaskRabbit.com to offer those very same skills to a small business owner who doesn’t have the resources to hire a full-time worker, but needs the work done nonetheless.
-Do you like driving? You can use your vehicle to transport people and earn income while doing so. Think Uber & Lyft.
-Got items sitting around the house that you don’t use and will never use? Sell those items on a site like Ebay or take them to the consignment shop.
-Do you have a vehicle that is just sitting around in your driveway doing nothing? You can rent that vehicle out using a peer-to-peer car sharing service like, www.GetAround.com
There aren’t many hurdles to doing this as you would only work during dates and times that are convenient to your schedule. Once you’ve started earning this income and working with the assumption that your day job covers (or substantially covers) your living expenses, you now can start reinforcing Principle #1:Paying Yourself First.
Whether you are starting a new job or getting ready to retire, there is always going to be a need to fulfill your goals. Why not use this newfound income to invest in your future?
