Change Your Perspective On Budgeting
Talk to any financial advisor and you will most likely hear how important having a budget is to establish a strong foundation for your personal finances. Over time you can graduate from managing your cash flow with more freedom and having to track every expense, but if you’re just getting started or looking to align your money with your spirit, mind, and body going back to the basics, understanding your cash flow, and seeing where your money is going is a must.
I’m doing this myself–in both my personal and business lives.
Over the last couple of years, as I aligned my spirit, mind, and body the money part of the equation was impacted. In order to move closer to my authentic life, I left a position, which meant walking away from additional income, which coincided with a nice market decline, which added to the reduction in income.
I wouldn’t change leaving income on the table for a higher quality of life and market corrections are a part of the business for a financial advisor, but with a more clear vision of my authentic life, I now have some specific savings goals for the next couple of years that require me to realign our finances with the spirit, mind, and body.
I’ve witnessed conversations about spending and budgeting move beyond just the numbers and become extremely emotional–emotions ranging from fear, shame, frustration, and excitement. If you haven’t been paying attention to your cash flow, going through your spending and evaluating your current budget can be eye-opening. We often think we spend our money in line with our values, but when we look at the actual numbers we learn we spend our money in a totally different way–possibly in conflict with our values.
That’s uncomfortable to admit, at first.
The numbers don’t lie and once you are able to accept how you are currently spending your money and process any emotions that arise, you can identify what areas of the budget are not in alignment with your values and begin to reallocate those dollars to the areas that do. Reallocating dollars in line with your values budgeting moves it from an activity you’d like to avoid to an exciting one.
The alignment of spirit, mind, and body directs you toward your authentic life, and as I’ve discussed before, money is the final component because it will fall in line with the first three. Finding this alignment is not necessary to evaluate your current budget and make changes, but your changes may not align with your authentic life.
For many, “budget” is a restrictive, limiting, and stressful term–this is when the budget is not aligned with spirit, mind, and body and is not moving you toward your authentic life. By aligning your money with spirit, mind, and body “budget” shifts to an exciting, empowering, and impactful term because there is purpose within the budget—your dollars are aligned with your values, and you can see how the allocation of dollars is moving you toward your authentic life.
Money is an important part of your authentic life but not the most important. Spend time working on the alignment of your spirit, mind, and body and allow money to fall into place making the exercise of budgeting a high-frequency experience.
See you tomorrow and keep pursuing,
JC
