George Antone uncovers how to achieve financial clarity and explores what is most likely holding you back as an investor.
What is the greatest obstacle standing in the way of your success as an investor?
If your answer is related to the instability of the economy or the rising cost of debt, you are wrong.
What is holding you back as an investor?
When you first embark on your journey as an investor, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Hundreds of technical terms, complex concepts, theories, and approaches exist, and it can be challenging to know where to start.
Starting your wealth journey can feel intimidating. What if you could cut through all the complexity and find a simple, relatable way to plan your financial future?
The key to cutting through the complexity is to adopt a mental model. A framework that helps you organize information. It helps make sense of your experiences and predicts outcomes based on your knowledge of how things work.
If you throw a ball into the air, you anticipate it falling back toward you. You can predict how the ball will behave because you have experienced this many times in your life. You understand why the ball falls back towards you because you have learned about gravity. You can apply the mental model of gravity to predict how the ball will behave.
Applying a relatable mental model to your wealth journey is the starting point to achieve financial clarity.
Embarking on Your Wealth Journey
In this example, we are going to apply the mental model of taking a vacation. You have likely taken a few vacations in your life. You know what needs to be done before, during, and after a vacation to make it a positive experience. Let’s apply these same principles to your wealth journey.
If you think about it, there are three basic steps you need to take to ensure a successful vacation. These are the same three steps you need to take to ensure a successful wealth journey.
We are going to explore each of these steps in turn.
STEP 1: Choose Your Destination
It might seem overly obvious, but you first need to decide where you will be going. Knowing your destination will determine all the other decisions that you will make about your trip.
It might surprise you that you might not have set a clear goal (or destination) for your wealth journey. Without a clear goal in mind, your wealth journey is simply wandering around without any clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.
How do you determine the end goal of your wealth journey?
First, you need to decide on the kind of lifestyle you want to live. You then need to calculate exactly how much passive income you must generate monthly to fund that lifestyle.
Don’t forget to take inflation into account when setting your goal. If you need $10,000 in passive income to fund your lifestyle today, you will need $14,000 to maintain that lifestyle in 5 years’ time, assuming a constant inflation rate of 7% per year. Once you know exactly what you want to achieve, you will start to achieve financial clarity.
STEP 2: Develop Your Roadmap
Once you know where you are going, you can start strategizing about your trip.
First, you will need to decide how you will be traveling. Will you take a road trip, fly, or take a train? You will need to ensure that the mode of transportation you choose is a viable way to reach your destination. If you decide to go from California to Hawaii by road, you are destined to fail.
You also need to adjust your mode of transportation throughout your trip. You might need to book a shuttle to the airport, board an airplane, take a train from the airport into the city, and then take a cab to reach your hotel.
As an investor, you need to choose the right strategies to achieve your passive income goal. If you choose a strategy that is not customized to reach your goal, you are destined to fail. You also need to change strategies as you move through the stages of your journey.
This is the most critical step in your wealth journey. And it’s also where most investors fail.
We help people achieve financial clarity as they work towards their desired lifestyle.
STEP 3: Follow Your Path to Achieve Financial Clarity
You know where you are going on vacation, and you know how you are going to get there and back again. What happens if you take a day trip at the same time you are booked to board your flight home? Anybody who has missed a flight because they failed to plan effectively will tell you it’s an expensive and time-consuming mistake.
The same is true for your wealth journey. Once you have a clear passive income goal in mind and the strategies you need to achieve that goal, it’s essential that you stay the course and follow your plan.
Many investors fail to meet their passive income goals because they bounce from one strategy to another without following a clear path. Another common mistake is to follow one strategy without question, ignoring the fact that you are not on course to achieve your goals.
The best way to ensure that you follow your plan is to have an accountability partner. Somebody who is well ahead of you on the wealth journey to guide you, keep you motivated, and help you stay focused despite all the possible distractions.
The accountability coaching team at Fynanc specializes in helping members to remain on track throughout their wealth journeys, which is why we enjoy such a high success rate among our community of investors.
Considering Constraints
We would all take a lot more vacations if we didn’t have to deal with time and money constraints. You may have a limited number of paid vacation days or have to plan your trip around your children’s schooling. You also will have to decide on a budget to cover all your traveling and living expenses while you are away.
These same constraints will determine the decisions you need to make on your wealth journey. If you start early in your career, you might have a lot of time on your hands but few assets and limited experience. If you start on your wealth journey later in life, you may have accumulated some assets and have more experience, but you will have limited time to achieve your goals. It’s essential that you have clarity on how much money you have to work with and how much time you have to achieve your passive income goals.
Achieve Financial Clarity with Fynanc
Taking a vacation with your loved ones can be a life-changing experience. However, vacations come and go. On the other hand, your wealth journey is the most important venture you will ever undertake. How you perform will determine your future and the future of generations that come after you.
You would never leave for a vacation without knowing your destination, planning your roadmap, and following your path. Why would you undertake your wealth journey without a plan in mind?
Make sure to watch Part 1 of the Principles First series by George Antone.
If you are ready to achieve your lifestyle goals faster, safer, and with more certainty, join us for our upcoming workshop:
