10 Steps To Financial Freedom: What are Your Financial Goals
Of course first you need to be earning a steady income before the steps below can even begin to apply to you, so read all the way to the end of this article for some suggestions own how to get started on your path to financial freedom.
Most of the limiting factors to achieving success are brought on by fear that resides in the walls of our mind. Achieving success lies in knocking down those walls. I’m going to tell you my 10 steps to financial freedom. The main point to take away from my article is that the biggest thing that holds people back from financial freedom is FEAR. The limiting factors to financial succ
There are two very important components to achieving financial freedom, one is the physical mechanics of achieving financial freedom and the other is the psychological component to achieving financial freedom. I’m going to lay out 10 steps to help alleviate your fears or hangups so that you will have a better understanding and therefore a better chance of financial success.
My 10 steps to financial freedom
Step 1: Seeing how your past holds the key to your financial future
For almost everyone, there is some key memory from days gone by, related to money that is particularly vibrant.
Why would you want to tease out that memory? Childhood memories, particularly strong ones, are layered in feelings of all kinds. Those memories are of the moments that defined who you are as a person, and true understanding of those memories can bring about significant insight into your adult life, which is what the second step deals with.
For me, I remember the time when I worked long and hard babysitting to earn enough money to buy a beautiful Prom Dress only to have it stolen from me by a neighbor lady who came to visit. She knew it was in the pocket of some jeans that were in my room. She took the jeans as well as the money. It is truly a painful memory to recall.
Step 2: Facing your fears and creating new truths
This second step follows the point of the first one. Once you’ve teased out that memory in detail, you can dig through it to see what exactly it says about your current views on personal finance.
The way to tease out these meanings is to make a list of your current fears. What are you afraid of? Once you’re able to be honest with yourself and list them, comparing these insights to your memory can be very insightful. Quite often, the memory explains the root cause of your fear.
To me, the first two steps felt very much like typical “self help” concepts, but they did work; I was able to find a key money memory and it did reflect clearly on my behavior with money today.
Step 3: Being honest with yourself
This is definitely the meatiest step and it provides the first non-psychological steps you can take to get your financial house in order, though this one is also a psychological trick at its core.
The basic idea is that most people don’t have a real grasp on what they’re spending or what they’re bringing in, and quite often people are spending more than they’re bringing in without really realizing it, thus creating severe financial problems over time.
One solution is to take two years worth of records and make a list of everything you spent by category, then make a monthly average for each category. Then, do the same thing for your income and compare the two.
Basically, this provides the background for a truly realistic budget; you can see from this data whether you’re overspending or not and you have actual feasible numbers to work with when determining where to cut fat to improve your finances.
Step 4: Being responsible to those you love
It’s important to keep a reserve fund for emergencies. If you should suddenly loose your income due to illness, job loss or other reasons you need to have a couple of months in reserve to cover immediate expenses.
You also need some make sure your insurance and wills are up-to-date as well as letting your loved ones know where all your financial documents are kept.
Step 5: Being respectful of yourself and your money
This step is about getting your own basic financial house in order, putting as much as possible into retirement, getting out from under any high-interest debt, and so forth. In essence, this will make you feel better about yourself and your money.
Pay off your credit cards as soon as you can, take advantage of every dime of employee matching in your optional retirement plans (401(k), 403(b), and so on), and max out what you can put in a Roth IRA.
Step 6: Trusting yourself more than you trust others
The sixth step focuses on building wealth for yourself. Basically, this chapter focuses on trusting yourself in terms of where to go next once your financial house is in order. Trust in your gut feelings, and use that gut feeling to guide your investing. You should become as comfortable as you can with your money so that you can follow your pure gut instinct about what’s right for you.
Step 7: Being open to receive all that you are meant to have.
This step focuses on the fact that money in and of itself doesn’t really bring happiness, but happiness can bring money. Thus, money is merely a tool to bring about happiness.
Step 8: Understanding the ebb and flow of the money cycle.
This step is merely the realization of the fact that much good can come from the bad times in our lives, whether it be new opportunities or merely personal growth. Quite often, the mistakes one makes in life end up being the foundation for much greater things.
Step 9: Recognizing true wealth
The final step is the simple recognition that the truly valuable things in life are not monetary. It seems simple, but so many people overlook this fact. The most valuable thing in my life, for instance, is the time I spend with all my wonderful family, sharing meals and fun parties as well as holidays and no amount of money can ever replicate that feeling.
Step 10: Save first, then spend what’s left as needed
So if you already have a great or even a good job, that’s great. I’m not going to tell you to quit your job. What I’m goig to do is show you how you can get a work at home online business started while you are still working your day job.
Getting an online business up and rolling and earning money takes a few months to achieve success. For this reason I suggest you keep your job while you are getting your online business started.
Don’t worry if you don’t know how to get started because we have the perfect system to take you from zero to earning a great income working online.
You can go in and take a look at our training program and the community for free. Heck, you can even go ahead and build yourself a free website. Just fill out your profile and you can have a website up and running in less than 5 minutes without spending a dime. Just click the banner below!
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