035 | The Balance Between Your Life and Your Money Goals

When lawyers learn about a new concept, our Type A-ness often leads us to try to make sure we’re doing it “right.” When we’re learning to manage our money better, this can lead to going overboard and forgetting to live life in the process. (Ask me how I know…)

In this episode, let’s talk about why balancing our money goals with living in the present is so important, my own struggle with balance in the beginning of my family’s financial journey, plus a few questions you can ask yourself to help you strike the right balance for you.

Lightly edited transcript appears after the show notes.

Topics Discussed

• why balancing money goals with living in the present is important
• my personal struggle with balance in the beginning of my family’s financial journey
• a few questions you can ask yourself to strike the right balance

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Resources mentioned

Lifestyle Freedom Starter Guide

Episode 3: Why Every Lawyer Should Be Seeking Financial Independence

Episode 26: Why You Won’t Be Happier When You Make Partner or Reach Financial Independence

Episode 34: “I Work Hard. I Deserve It.”

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Lightly Edited Transcript

Hey friend. Happy Friday.

How are you? I hope you had an amazing week and you are gearing up for a great weekend.

So today we are talking about balance in your life and your money.

You know, I’m all about lifestyle freedom and the ability to make choices for your life without regard to what other people think you should do, or what they’ll think about your decisions right.

Changing our thoughts helps us achieve more freedom in the short term, but for many of us, it’s money that stops us from fully stepping into the choices we want to make for our lives.

And so I’ve told you that my solution to that is financial independence. It’s the point at which you have enough assets that you no longer have to work to cover your living expenses.

And you can head back to episode three which is where I first introduced the concept of financial independence, if you’re not familiar with it.

But anyway, one of the things I see when people first decide to try to reach financial independence, or to reach any money goal really, is they’ll go full force and basically put their lives on hold for this point in the future when they reach their goal.

So they’re you know slashing everything in the budget and wanting to save everything and eat ramen noodles and walk or ride bikes everywhere. And this may work for some people.

Some people really want to live this way, or they just don’t mind powering through to reach their goals and more power to them right, but that’s not me.

And if that’s not you either, I want you to know it’s okay if you don’t want to live that kind of lifestyle, but you’re trying to do it anyway because you think you “should” right.

We get into this mindset or have these thoughts about what we should do when we’re being responsible with our money, but that looks different for different people.

And so if you’re trying to live that lifestyle, but it doesn’t resonate with you, it’s not right for you, then you’re going to get burned out before you reach your goal, and you’re ultimately going to set yourself back.

Because if you get burned out and then quit right and get back into all of the habits that were keeping you stuck before and not allowing you to make progress with your money, then it’s going to take you that much longer to get to the ultimate goal.

Also, I want to remind you that thinking that life will be better, or that you’ll be happier in the future when you hit a certain goal or reach a certain point in life is a mistake. It’s called the arrival fallacy, which we talked about back in Episode 26, so go back and check that one out if you missed it.

Most lawyers have a long way to go before we reach financial independence or even debt freedom, right, considering that many of us graduate with six figure student loans or multi six figure student loans.

The personal finance world focuses a lot on strategies and tactics for paying off debt and making money and, you know, saving, investing, and tax efficiency, and all of that stuff.

But one thing that’s not talked about enough is having balance. It doesn’t make sense to put your life on hold until you hit your goals, especially when the whole point of our money journeys is to open up more opportunities to enjoy our lives and the people and things that really matter to us.

Or at least that’s the point for me, and I imagine, since you’re listening to this show that you’re interested in the same thing, but you know let me not assume.

But if money is a tool to allow us to take control of our time so that we can do the things that we want to do, then it does not make sense to put off things that we want to do until we hit the point where we’ve paid off our debt or whatever the case may be.

Now if you heard all that and thought I said YOLO, then you missed it, right. My point is, you want to make progress on your financial goals, but not at the expense of the rest of your life.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And I remember when we first started our financial journey. And I told you I had a personal finance blog too so I was deep in this personal finance world, and I was listening to all the podcasts and reading books and the blogs and interacting with other money bloggers.

And there were so many people who had already paid off all their debt or reached financial independence, and sometimes I felt like we weren’t doing enough.

I would compare our situation with where they were kind of like what we talked about with the “I work hard; I deserve it” mentality back in Episode 34, except instead of comparing and thinking we needed to buy more stuff, I was comparing with people who had less debt or more investments and thinking that we should be further along which also isn’t helpful.

And I was definitely comparing our beginning to their middle or end and downplaying what we had already done.

We had paid off a lot of debt. We had paid, like $50,000, the very first year, and I was proud of that.

But I was seeing the debt free stories and wanting to be there too and then making myself feel bad because of my thoughts that we weren’t doing enough. Never mind that those people didn’t have nearly as much debt as we did.

Truth be told, we had probably paid off just as much debt as many of them, but we just had a larger balance right.

All that to say, don’t be like me. We’ve talked about this before. Look at what other people have done as an example of what’s possible for you, but don’t use their stories against yourself.

It’s important for us to live our lives, even as we improve our finances. We’ve talked before about the importance of your why.

So when you’re setting your financial goals, you want to have in mind the thing that’s going to keep you motivated to keep going when you’re ready to give up.

We’re not just paying off debt to pay it off, or building wealth just to build wealth right?

What’s the deeper reason? For many of us, it’s being able to control our time so that we can spend more of it on the things that really matter to us.

So, yes, we want to be responsible with our money. We’re paying off debt and we’re saving and investing and we’re making sacrifices because every choice we make is a trade off right. I might choose not to buy X so that I can have more money to buy Y or so that I can pay off more debt or save or you know whatever the financial goal is.

But those sacrifices don’t have to mean that your quality of life completely suffers in the interim until you reach your ultimate goal.

There’s so much more to life than money. It’s about relationships and experiences and making memories, and money is a tool that allows us to buy back our time so we can spend it doing what really matters.

At the end of the day, everyone has to do what works best for them. But I think that in addition to working toward our financial goals, we also have to live.

So here are a few questions to keep in mind when you’re trying to balance life with your financial goals.

1. Will this choice make me happy? And when you’re thinking about this one. You want to think about whether the choice will make you happy in the long run, not just the short term.
2. How does this choice fit with my why? Going back to the ultimate reason that you set a particular financial goal in the first place. If a particular choice doesn’t align with that reason then maybe it’s not the right choice for you.
3. How will this impact my long term goals? With this one you want to think both about your financial goals, but also your goals in other areas of your life because money impacts all areas of our lives and we’re not looking at our money in a vacuum. Right, we need to look at our lives holistically.
4. How much will this delay my financial goals? So if it’s a minor thing that’s going to take just a little bit of money, and it’s something that will really make you happy, then why not go for it. On the other hand, if you have to like clean out all your savings and cash out your retirement and, you know, do all of these different tricks to try to scrape up the money to do the thing, then maybe you want to make another choice, or maybe just think about a different way to accomplish this thing that you’re trying to do.

At the end of the day, with all of this, the point is, don’t get so caught up in the money part that you forget about the living part. Balance is so important and so we need to make sure that we’re living in the present, and not putting off life for some random point in the future.

If you need help figuring out how to strike that balance. I’m a financial coach and this is the kind of work I do with my clients, so head to rhothomas.com/coaching, we can set up a call and discuss how coaching can help.

Okay, let’s recap.

1. Often when people first decide to reach financial independence or improve their money in general, they try to go full force and slash their budget down to nothing, and then burn out.
2. We need balance between living life and hitting our money goals, but this doesn’t mean YOLO.
3. There’s more to life than money. Money is just a tool that helps us buy back our time. Life is about relationships experiences and memories.
4. Some questions to keep in mind as you’re trying to find the right balance between living your life and reaching your financial goals are: Will this choice make me happy? How does this choice fit with my why? How will this impact my long term goals? And how much will this delay my financial goals?

Okay, so that’s it for this week, friend. Join me over in our private Facebook community, The Wealthyesque Community, and let’s talk more about striking the right balance between living your life and reaching your financial goals. You can find us at rhothomas.com/community.

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Okay, friend, as we close out, I pray that you will identify what truly matters to you in life and prioritize those things.

I pray that you find the right balance between living your life and reaching your money goals.

And as always I pray that you continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve.

Talk to you later.