Take a Financial Inventory - a Unique Twist

Financial stress. Something most people have known for different periods and seasons of their lives, for some it’s a lifetime of stress, others only periods of it. It’s definitely something that robs your level of comfort and peace. Solving some of those financial issues are a real and vital step to bringing deeper levels of comfort to your life.
Finances are also intricately tied to how much time we have available, time that could be spent with family and friends and other pursuits and dreams. It seems that’s the trade off, many times we have one, but not the other. But does it always have to remain so? Something deep inside me says it doesn’t always have to be that way.

Sometimes because of past financial mistakes, poor judgment or just plain old “stuff happens” we can become too hardened, too skeptical and miss opportunities (although I hate that word due to the connotations it brings up, in the context of finances/business, you know the dreaded “business opportunity” stalker). Open doors that may be real and legitimate sources of help to our situations, that we’re too burned to go for because of the past. I’ve made plenty of those poor choices myself, and have gone through the “nothing works, why try” thing too. However, I’ve also come to realize there’s only so many hours a day I can work, there is a very real ceiling of finances that a job can bring, and something needs to change in order to gain having the time, energy and the resources to spend on my family and dreams as I would like.

Take a moment and get out paper and pencil, or a journal, and think of those “failures” a moment. What were the lessons learned? Try to think of the real lessons behind them, not the “I shouldn’t have fallen for that”. Even if true, pinpoint WHY not? The lessons we learn from failure are just as valid as the lessons we learn from success, and each lesson in failure we walk away learning from, brings us that much closer to learning the opposite, success. Take each experience one by one (including wrong career moves) and add to your list of what you learned from each experience. In a typical lifetime, there will probably be several to many experiences. Do not allow these past failures or perceived failures to cripple you from taking educated risks for your future. If you allow these things to paralyze you from ever trying again, then those failures in your life have won. Personally, I don’t want those things to have that kind of power over me.

I’ll give an example out of my own life of one in my list (bear in mind these are for my life, in that time, these very same decisions might be just perfect for someone else’s circumstances). The first one that comes to my mind is my decision to become a cosmetologist. I had just graduated from high school and this is where my interest was, after all if you do what you love the money will follow, right? I loved doing hair and makeup and helping people to feel good about themselves. I loved the work, was good at what I did, even won a contest for my skills, graduated and began work in the field. However, I did not have a good grasp of the financial reality of this career. Now, there are people who can make a good living doing this, but I wasn’t among them for a variety of reasons. The first being you needed to pretty much stay in the same salon for many years to develop a strong, loyal customer base, but in the meantime of building that base, there were many days I made 0. After all if you didn’t have customers you didn’t get any pay. That’s right, 0 dollars for 8 hours of being at work! If you had to pay daycare, you could actually go into negative numbers going to work! I had no clue that could happen. I never asked the right questions, and was immature and not thinking about how I could pay my bills, the reality of it, I just wanted to do something I loved doing. This little chickie got her first reality check when mommy and daddy were no longer paying the bills. I struggled with this same scenario for many years trying to make it work, had invested too much to cut my losses and move on. Most people don’t just settle into one place early in life for years and years. My hubby had job moves across country, etc. each move was a start over with clientele. Finally, after much banging my head against the same wall, I saw that as much as I loved what I did, I couldn’t pull a reasonable salary, and the reality was I needed to pay bills to provide for my family. Sometimes reality bites.

What did I learn from this “failure” of career? I learned I was capable of learning new skills if I put my mind to it and wasn’t afraid of work, I learned that in whatever prospect I went for, to not only look at interest, but to research into a broader base of people doing the work and asking the tough financial questions, not so much their salary, but general questions on that topic that would give me a better feel of how they’re doing and the industry. Doing other research into salary ranges and financial viability was important. I learned to ask better questions about a field in general and trends currently happening as well as looking at trends on the horizon of that industry, to research with my head and not my heart only. I learned I love helping people feel good about themselves. I learned about time management, appointments and professionalism in the industry. I also learned a few things I didn’t like that are valuable to know. I have other experiences to draw from too, as you most likely will as well.
The point is, take an inventory, draw from what went wrong and the root causes. Pick every instance you can think of to do this, even possibly humiliating ones. This is for no one’s eyes but yours; it’s for your benefit and yours alone. You might be very surprised after taking this inventory, at the knowledge you are now working with that you didn’t have before, and those were hard lessons you don’t want to forget. That is valuable.

I’m choosing to learn from those things, glean the life lessons I can, and take courage to try again, with more wisdom this time around. It does take risk to move past what is. I want to take that risk, to dare to try bettering my family’s quality of life. To not risk means it won’t happen for sure. That’s the one real risk I won’t take.
There is a wealth of resources for many other aspects in a financial life, whole books and even libraries on the topic; my encouragement would be to simply start studying.