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During your second third of life building a sound financial future is mostly about building sustainable healthy habit patterns. Ignoring the future is important because the sole focus of building that future lies in creating a healthy now. A healthy now actually assures a more fruitful future.
Learning the languages of family finances
I grew up in the language of money. It came natural to me.
I am married to an incredible woman with many super talents. Money wasn’t one of them. We had to build our financial system for our family together. Like the rest of our married lives we had to create many aspects of life from scratch.
Elaine being a concert musician understood music theory and how a piece of music was constructed. We used that metaphor as a baseline for understanding.
If your life were a piece of music in composition then the financial parts would be the bass tracks. Bass tracks hold all of the rest of the construction together. Paying attention to the bass tracks gives the composition ample chance to be worth listening to when completely finished.
Elaine and I invested time to build a habit pattern to account for money coming in and money going out. My goal was to run our family like a business which meant we wanted to have consistent money left over every month which represented profit from all of our combined work.
I know how radical that concept is in deficit spending in the America we live within today. We totaled up the income, kept track of expenses and began to see money build up within our bank accounts. The motivation came from the creative idea we wanted to make beautiful music together.
To me we were a family running a business for profit. To my wife we were assembling a score suitable to be enjoyed while playing good music, certainly for us, but also for others as well.
Not very many music scores are hammered out in one sitting. It is typical for them to be worked upon over many different periods of time. Working a little here and there as time permits. Often a composer will allocate specific times when they force themselves to sit at the keyboard and add to the score.
Consistently working together produces great music…
…and adequate finances.
The two of us developed a habit pattern for our finances as well. We allocated the third Saturday morning of every month to review all of our prior months income and expenses. We would also review how all that stacked up with our prior months agreed upon plan for income and spending.
For those monthly meetings we would always do something fun, usually making breakfast together and then we would burn up the calculators doing the “money thing”. The idea for me to was to see the profits. She on the other hand would engage in the process because she was composing a piece of music representing our lives.
Making sense with finances takes a commitment to consistent attention.
We built the habit pattern then, that we still use now. Now we review once a quarter. I am still thinking family for profit and she is writing an academy award winning score. Even during tough times we had motivation to keep at the habit and actually enjoy making financial progress while writing great music scores.
Maybe you are a mechanical engineer married to a registered nurse. How will you learn the language of money that builds habits and also creates a strong financial now and assures an opportunity for a great financial future? Hopefully you are building a strong financial health system for your family.
What if you are a couple of educators? Could you be working to become financially educated sufficient to write a book on the subject?
Look deep inside yourselves to discover your own methods for making sense out of the financial world we live in today. It is a creative process for everyone. Those who build systems supported by consistent habit patterns enjoy the benefits of having a secure financial now.
Consistent attention, over time, yields a sound financial future.
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