These changes have helped me save millions of dollars, and also to be honest, make millions
of dollars as well.
In my business and in my lifestyle, it has freed up so much financial space and Headspace,
and that's allowed me to make more money.
These are my very simple steps to financial freedom.
I wanted to share these, because I've actually never really talked about the fact that when
I started my business, I was not in a great financial place, I wasn't in a terrible financial
place, but I had debt just like a lot of us do, and I needed to figure out how to get
out of it while I still wasn't making very much money at all, and I was really only able
to pay my rent and that was about it, and barely at that.
I did have some months where my parents actually helped me out with my rent.
This was a couple of years ago, and obviously things have changed since then, but I never
talked about how I have progressed not only in my financial journey but also my mindset
around money and the habits that I've created for myself, and the things that helped me
get into a solid financial place, which I think is so important, because the truth is
if you're not set financially and you don't have financial peace of mind, it puts you
in a very vulnerable position, and I can track back some of the worst decisions that I've
made and the worst situations that I've been in to being in a financially vulnerable spot
and it's not a nice place to be.
If you're excited about this video, hit that like button, be sure to subscribe if you haven't
already yet, which is kind of rude.
Make sure you subscribe, hit the bell to get notified every single time I post a new video,
and share this with somebody who you think would find it really helpful because there's
so much information in this video that is going to be helpful if you really want to
get into a solid financial place.
This has been my method, so lots of lifestyle changes.
I'm kind of going to take you on a little like home tour to show you these lifestyle
changes and the things that I've done, as well as this is a bit of a tutorial.
If you want to grab a notebook or something to take notes during this, it will be helpful.
We've also put together, basically a checklist to go along with this video so that you can
implement this into your own life as well.
The first thing is, the first tactic I guess, is what I call runway, and it's a very common
term in business, but I actually first applied this to my personal life.
The reality with your money, and something that a financial advisor told me when I had
no money, and it was probably the best advice I ever received, they said, if you don't save
your money, and if you don't commit to putting a certain amount of money away every month,
you'll use it.
But if you save it, and if you just put it away, you do kind of forget about it.
I started by putting away like a $100 a month, I think it was, and just accumulated that
over a year and that was $1,200, not bad, right to save that.
How I figured out the best way to kind of set myself up for this, was to create runway
in my life.
Runway basically means that if my business stopped running today, I would have X amount
of months in the bank to be able to pay all my business expenses and still keep the business
running even if we made no more money.
I'm really proud to say that we've gotten to a place where we have over a year of runway
in the business right now.
That is a massive security blanket to have for the business.
I remember the first time I had this conversation with a mentor and I was like, I have half
a month maybe.
And it was such a panicky moment.
If you're feeling that panic, that's okay, I've been in your shoes and all you have to
do is do this practice first to really understand the lay of the land, because if you're unaware
about your financial situation, it's only going to get worse.
You have to give yourself that sort of cold slap of reality of what it actually looks
like.
I have this little spreadsheet, and I do this every month, you guys can take a look at it,
and it basically helps me track all of my expenses.
I just did this and this as an example.
And like I said, there'll be a checklist associated with this video where you guys can download
below.
But it's things like, okay, what are my monthly expenses?
Let's just get a lay of the land.
And again, you can do this for business too, but we're going to do this for personal, because
this is how I started.
Monthly expenses are rent, food, things like groceries or meal delivery, if you do something
like that or meal prep, entertainment, this could be like concerts, restaurants, apps,
insurance, home, health, car, gym, phone, emergency fund.
I do like to put this in here even though it's not an expense, I like to add it in because
it just gives you an extra buffer.
Then student loan, which is what I had and why I was in debt when I first started my
business.
Then I had car debt as well.
Basically you also can add in here a debt free date.
Your debt free date is your target date for when you want to pay off this debt.
I put these in here as just examples, and the amount that you would need to put into
each of these things, each of these debt places in order to hit that target date, and the
amount that all of these expenses add up to which is $3,000, so this creates your runway.
Basically it tells you that your bare minimum is you need $3,000 a month to survive, that
means that you need to save as many $3,000 months as you can.
The first thing to do is let's just try and get one month of runway.
You start to put away a little bit of money every month and save it and forget about it,
and that becomes your runway, and your runway you will not touch, it is basically there
in case something serious happens where you need a security blanket and a safety net.
Now the one thing that I didn't put on here, but also is a financial game changer for me
is understanding compound interest.
When I met with a financial advisor, when I had basically no money, they were like,
let's just get you started with mutual funds, and putting money into a place where you're
actually going to make money on your money, so basically having the interest accrue and
compound year over year.
Compound interest is a beautiful thing because your money basically makes money for you.
That's something to look into once you do have a little bit of runway, once you do have
a little bit of security is how much could you put into, let's say a mutual fund or something
else that's going to generate interest for you year over year, month over month so that
your money actually makes money for you.
Again, when it comes to that, talk to accountants, talk to financial advisors, see what works
best for you.
But that was one of the best pieces of advice that I've ever gotten.
I started with doing like $100 a month and I think I do like $200 a week now in one of
them, and then it's a lot more than another one.
But I honestly don't even think about it, and I stopped thinking about it the moment
I started doing it, and I thought it was such a big expense at the time, but now it's been
like five years and I've saved a lot of money in these accounts that I just do not touch,
and every year they're accruing interest and so they're making money without me doing anything,
which is another form of passive income.
Okay.
That's one of the really nerdy stuff.
Now I want to talk to you about the next thing that I did, which is making less decisions,
so reducing your decisions.
That's another big part of financial freedom.
One of the big things is understanding that with more decisions, you clutter your brain
space and it creates less time to actually work on the things that are going to make
you money.
If you haven't watched this video on the one thing that I figured out in order to become
a millionaire, then you probably should watch that next, because I talk about the value
of focusing on one thing, and this applies not just to business, it also applies to your
life.
I basically decided I don't want to make as many decisions as I'm making, so big things
were I'm going to wake up the same time every day, I'm going to go to sleep at the same
time every day, because if I have to think about it or I'm going to sleep at random times,
it messes with my brain, it messes with my productivity and then it messes with my business
and the amount of money that I'm actually able to make, save, and put into runway and
security blanket.
Reducing your decisions is vital.
Something else that I did to reduce my decisions was I decided this is really full right now,
it's not usually this full, it's also quite organized.
But I decided I was going to get meal delivery, at first I would just do meal prep for myself
and so I would do a bulk batch of one thing of like, quinoa, vegetable and some sort of
protein every single Sunday, instead of doing that, now I actually pay a company to bring
me meals, and my fiance meals, once a week.
I don't even have to think about making lunch, because I work from home, and I would go eight
hours without eating, because I just don't think about it and I didn't want to have to
make the decision of where should I go get lunch today?
What am I going to make for lunch today?
If you can relate to this, let me know in the comments because the struggle was real
for me, and I know it's a total first world problem, but it was an extra decision to make
that took me away from my business and interrupted my flow, interrupted how productive I was
during the day, and how much money I was able to make, and how many people I was able to
talk to, and how many clients I was able to get into our programs.
You want to basically take an audit of your life, in your relationships, in your business,
in your health, in your fitness.
What are the things that you have to decide on doing right now that you could take out
so you have that brain space to focus on actually making more money and saving more money?
Another really good example of this is working out.
I know the hardest part for me of actually working out is getting to the workout.
One of the things that I did is I actually switched to a new gym for the majority of
my workouts because it's walking distance, it actually takes me four minutes to get from
my house to the gym, which reduces the amount of decisions I need to make, I don't need
to get in the car, I don't need to worry about parking, I just need to get there.
It's little things like that that seems so silly, but they free up so much brain space.
Okay.
The next thing is kind of along these lines.
We have reducing decisions, we have your runway, and then the next thing is clutter.
Oh Lord, I used to be a clutter queen, and I would just buy things for the sake of buying
them, which was so silly, and it was when I didn't have a lot of money, but I just was
sort of collecting crap.
I wasn't like a hoarder or anything like that, but I did have a lot of clothes that I just
didn't wear.
I have been making a very conscious effort in the last year to minimize the amount that
I buy, and I'm very intentional with what I buy, and I only buy pieces that pretty much
can go with everything.
They're basics, they are timeless, and they aren't really trendy because trends for me
are things that tend to go in the back of your closet and just create more clutter.
The more clutter you have, the less brain space you have.
Actually prime example of this, before I open my closet, Steve Jobs used to wear a black
turtleneck with blue jeans every single day, and he said that he did it because he knows
he has finite brain energy and space, and he wanted to put that brain energy towards
business.
That's a pretty good example and role model to follow for you and your business and your
life, to make that, even that little decision has a big impact.
I did a little before and after before on Instagram, which we'll show right now, but
you can see that I've even reduced it down further and I really haven't noticed a difference.
I don't have a ton in my closet, this is obviously just one side of my closet, and the process
is a process, and I'm not saying I'm a total minimalist by any means, and I'm sure you're
probably watching me like I don't think I can throw out anything, but you can, there's
stuff in there that you haven't worn.
I've done a lot of clean outs of my closet to make it simpler and to only have pieces
that I know will last a very long time that are ethically made, and that aren't fast fashion,
and make it really easy for me to get dressed every day because they're very simple.
They're very simple pieces and they're colors that I would wear all the time, black, white,
gray, that's like pretty much what my closet consists of.
It's just gotten more and more minimal with time.
Like I said, this has been a process and these have been the steps for me that have allowed
me to build a multimillion dollar business and become debt free and live a better lifestyle.
Like I said, finances makes such a huge difference to decisions that you're able to make in your
life.
Again, my worst decisions have come at times when I have been vulnerable because I was
broke.
When you're broke, you're reactive and you do things that you wouldn't normally do, and
you make decisions you wouldn't normally do, and you're around people that you don't even
want to be around.
What I want for you is to put yourself in a good financial position so that you can
make decisions from a very confident, and secure, and grounded place, because that's
only going to help you grow further and faster as well.
We have a whole checklist with everything I just went over, that spreadsheet is included
in there, it's in the description below this video in that link.
If you like this video, give me some feedback because I've never made a video like this
before, so give me a like, make sure to comment and let me know what you thought, subscribe,
hit the bell to get notified every single time I post a new video, and check out these
videos next on even more resources on how to become financially free and really become
the master of your own money fate.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope this is helpful.
See you next time.
Bye.