What's Worse Than Wasting Money?
Welcome to the fifth installment of our ten-week video series, which will help you avoid the most common red flags that are keeping you broke. If you’d like to follow along with our FREE guide, you can download your copy here.
The fifth red flag we’re covering today is you don’t spend time working on your finances and learning about money.
I’ve had the incredible opportunity to work with so many individuals and families and helping them learn how to budget, save money, and pay off debt. Along the way, I’ve also spoken with many people who are interested in getting help with their finances, but I don’t get to help them. Why? Well the number one reason or excuse I hear is, “I don’t have time! I'm just too busy.”
If you're reading this and you lack savings and are deep in debt, we have something in common, because like many people, I struggled with money and debt, too. I had very little savings, and I was broke! It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the basic math, or that I didn’t make enough money—it was because of my bad financial behavior, and ultimately, how I spent my time.
To be fair, of course I spent some time on my money, just like you do. But it was paying bills and being REACTIVE to every situation that would happen to me. Those situations only put me further in the hole, because being reactive doesn't produce positive financial results. Being PROACTIVE is what moves the needle, and that's what I needed to spend time on.
So what was I so busy doing back then that I couldn't take some time to work on my financial life and be proactive? Let’s take a look, and I think you’ll find we have a lot of these in common.
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Eating - We spend on average 70 minutes a day eating and drinking. By the way, this doesn’t include the preparation or the clean up!
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Social Media - The average person will spend nearly two hours a day on social media. That’s five years and four months in a lifetime.
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YouTube - 40 Minutes
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Facebook - 35 Minutes
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Snapchat - 25 Minutes
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Television - The average person watches five hours and four minutes of TV per day. More than four hours are LIVE broadcasts. That’s more than 77 24-hour days a year on average spent watching TV!
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Work - If you worked 40 hours per week, with three weeks vacation, from age 20 to 65, you would have worked 88,200 hours. That’s More than 10 years of your life. Keep in mind that many people work more than 40 hours per week.
To be fair, these are common things that we all spend time doing, I get that we probably can't cut out eating and working, right?
But what about social media? I can't tell you how many times I open a social media app only to have 30 minutes fly by without even blinking. Social media is great at sucking you in.
What about television, or gaming? Could we spare some time there?
This list doesn’t even include all the other things we spend time on. We all could add so many things to this list, and for many, working and spending time on finances rarely makes our to-do list.
The thing that pains me looking at this list is how much time we spend working for our money, on average, more than 10 years of our lifetime, but then we spend very little time figuring out how to use that money to reach our financial goals.
Emergencies are going to happen, tragedies are going to strike, your kids may go to college, you’re going to retire, you’re going to want to do some cool stuff, you’re going to want to pursue some dreams, and you’re going to want to have the cash for all those things. Nobody loves the idea of going into debt, but when you don’t work on your finances, that’s the only choice you leave yourself, and that’s a bad plan.
You make time for what’s important to you. If it’s not important, all you will make are excuses. What are those excuses costing you? Well, you can continue to be broke, have no emergency savings, no retirement savings, and live with financial stress and anxiety. I’ve been there, done that, and that's no way to live!
Getting started on your finances does take some time, no question. But, as you put things into motion, the less time you have to spend on it. Think of it as gardening or weeding your lawn. When you first start, it’s a lot of work! Pulling weeds and rocks, fertilizing, turning the soil. But, once you're done with that initial grunt work, you just have to maintain your lawn and garden a little bit every day. Your financial life isn't any different!
My challenge for you today is to make some time to work on your finances. Start figuring out where you're wasting time. What are you doing right now that isn't giving you the results you want? Cut it out of your life, and you use that time to start working on your finances.
It doesn't have to be a ton of time either.
Start with 15-30 minutes each day. You might be asking, what do I do with that time? Well, for starters you can download the FREE guide that goes with this video series, and start working on removing these financial red flags from your life. There's plenty to work on to keep you busy.
The more time you can work on your financial challenges, means the less time you will have to spend worrying and stressing about money problems in the future.
Make the time to tackle your financial challenges today! Your future self will thank you!
