New Year, New Plan: Potential
Part 1
With the New Year quickly approaching it’s a great time to press the refresh button on your finances. Start by reevaluating your financial plan and make sure it’s right for you and your lifestyle. To get started, take some time to think about your financial potential. You may have never thought about what your potential is in regards to your finances, but knowing this can give you perspective on how to fulfill on what is possible.
Everyone has the potential to earn a large sum of money in their lifetime. Even people who are living paycheck to paycheck. If a 25 year old earning $25,000 a year continues to earn that amount of money for the next 40 years, they will have $1,000,000. That’s not a small amount of money and it doesn’t take into account future raises and opportunities. So, if we have the capacity to earn this much money over our lifetime, why does it feel like we are not getting ahead? The reality is while we earn money, we aren’t able to keep all of it. We have to feed ourselves, provide shelter, pay taxes and live life. These wealth eroding factors drain away our potential and in many cases, what is left over may not appear to be much. Don’t despair. Once you know what your financial potential is you can then work on ways to eliminate the eroding factors that take away its wealth.
To eliminate wealth eroding factors and better maximize your potential you need to look at:
How you are making money decisions? With different people? At different times? Under different circumstances?
Are these decisions working together?
Are you aware of your vulnerabilities?
Does your plan consider taxes, inflation, market fluctuations, technological change, planned obsolescence, legislative changes and so forth?
What stops you from planning ahead financially?
What are your fears, concerns, hopes and dreams?
Take a minute to calculate your financial potential. It may not be exact, but you can get an idea of it, if you take your current earnings and multiply that by the number of years you estimate you will be working. A Leap adviser can give you a more accurate number, but this will serve as a high level guide. In addition, the unique skills of a Leap adviser will help you develop strategies that mitigate against the wealth eroding factors. The result is you keep more and get closer to fulfilling on your full financial potential. Start your year off by thinking differently. Take the first step to consider where you are today and what is possible for a financially successful 2017.
