All You Need is Guidance and Practice
Just like any other skill, managing your money takes deliberate practice and education. Unfortunately, most people are let down by the personal finance curriculum at school (if they received any at all!).
The Mindful Money Project is here to support you on that journey to getting in control of, and understanding, your own personal finances, allowing you to work towards your place of financial happiness.
Do you want to be debt-free? Pay down your mortgage? Save a deposit for a house? Save for a wedding? Retire early?
Even though these goals are all wildly different, all of them require the same foundations.
These foundations are skills that you can learn and refine with practice.
The Mindful Money Project is a resource to help guide you through the process and provide a framework. A framework that is helping me work towards my goal and that I wished was available at the start of my journey.
What’s the process?
Breaking the process into 3 distinct steps helps to frame how each piece fits into the bigger picture.
The “Why”
This is your motivation. Even if it isn’t a well-defined vision when you start, it is important to have a reason.
Debt-free? House deposit? Financial independence? Early retirement?
This influences the scale of your “How”.
Personal Profit
If income > expenses, you are making a personal profit.
This is the most critical part, but also one of the hardest.
Ideally you want to continually aim to increase this.
Invest
With your personal profit, you can use this to work towards your goal defined in step 1.
This is typically anything that builds your net worth (pay down debt, save cash, invest in assets).
When you invest in productive assets, you also help to increase your personal profit further. Spinning the flywheel that makes the rest easier.
Greg
After having to get a tight grip on my finances living as a student in one of the most expensive cities in the world, London, I had to learn money management fast (exacerbated with the potential for having to drop out due to lack of money after rinsing through my savings in record time).
I knuckled down fast and took stock of my situation, worked out the shortfall and worked 20-30 hour weeks alongside my studies to get me through that period (luckily it was just one academic year!).
I hadn’t been given any guidance from school or family, and so had to learn what worked for me via trial and error. Loads of techniques and tools failed, but the framework I use allows me to save >40-50% of my income (dependent on the month), and has helped my close family members to get on top of their finances too.
Now a qualified Chartered Accountant working in the UK, I want to empower and educate people on how to manage, and improve their relationship with, money so they can feel confident that they are moving towards their money goals intentionally and deliberately.
