Achieving Financial Security through Balance and Goal Setting

Be Responsible For Your Own Financial Security

by Denis Waitley

There is no job security. You can’t rely on staying with the same company through retirement. Pension plans, when available, are woefully inadequate. Social security benefits won’t come close to covering your living expenses in retirement.

The only way to reach financial security is to plan for it now, regardless of your age. You have to define financial security in your own terms. Have you defined the amount of assets that you need for financial independence?

Financial security is that amount of assets that will give you a specific income, after taxes, to live like you want to, without having to depend on day-to-day employment.

What is that amount for you? I believe it is more than you think. And, I feel that if you define it, you can reach it in ten years or less. Do you have a financial plan and the assistance of a financial planner?  You need both. Always retain a financial planner on a fee-for-service basis. Don’t mix financial planning with an investment broker or insurance agent. What are your financial goals and what is your time line? Because I started late in my quest for financial independence, I have a maximum five-year period remaining for capital accumulation.

Action Idea: Wealth is not only based on income, but also on expenditures. Are you spending or investing?  Are your purchases goal-achieving or tension-relieving? How do you use credit cards? Use your credit cards for services or purchases that retain their value or that build your business. Don’t use credit cards for vacations and personal entertainment, unless you plan to pay the entire balance in one or two months. Try to pay all your balances in full monthly. In this way, you avoid the ridiculously high interest payments. Realize that paying minimum balances, at high interest rates, means that you are paying two or three times what the original purchase was worth.

Most importantly, save at least 6 to 10 percent of your take-home pay each month, by writing a check into a savings account or mutual fund for that amount, as if it were a utility bill or house payment. The secret of most self-made multi-millionaires is compound interest. If parents saved one dollar each day for their newborn infant, by going without a cup of Starbuck’s coffee, or a Big Mac, or a soft drink for that day, by the time the child reached age forty, he or she would have a million dollars cash. No lottery windfall. No brilliant investment strategy. Just compound interest, which Baron von Rothchild labeled “The Eighth Wonder of the World.”

I'm really looking forward to working with you to reach new heights of success and balance in your personal and professional life! Sonia Gallagher, JD Holistic Executive Life Coach PS. If you are ready to be challenged, to steer your life in a new direction, and to achieve the goals you desire, I invite you to request a Free Coaching Session and Experience Coaching and How It Can Benefit Your First-hand!

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Are you Realizing your Goals?

Why not realize your goals?

Have you forgotten what it is you want to become and have? Probably you have made a few attempts, found that your strategies didn’t work and lost yourself along the way.

It all starts with the goal.

Define and describe it. Write down when you want to achieve it. Write down the reasons why you want it. Write down how it would feel like when you have achieved it.

Plan it.

Planning counts. Plans, strategies and actions steps show you the way. Plan what you want to do and how you want to do it. Break down the tasks. A good map makes navigation easier.

Work hard at it.

Work harder than you ever did. If you don’t get the result, try something else. If that something else does not work too, modify and try doing it differently. You may have to spend many hours, days and nights but as long as you persist, you will get it right.

Visualize it.

Use your imagination to create it first inside even before you can have it on the outside. Picture having your ambition realized in your mind. Put in the sounds and the feelings. Rerun it over and over again.

Listen to your internal dialogue.

What you are saying inside affects you physically, emotionally and mentally. Is your defense system inside trying to make you stick to your old limiting beliefs and perceptions? Take over and challenge your inner critics.

Focus your attention.

Don’t get swayed easily with the noise and happenings going on outside. Put your attention on what you are trying to achieve. Remember the goal and you will have control over the discomforts and difficulties.

Seek help.

Find the information, skills and knowledge that you need from other people, books, and audio or video programs. Speed up your learning process by emulating what other successful people have done. You save time and get results faster.

I'm really looking forward to working with you to reach new heights of success and balance in your personal and professional life! Sonia Gallagher, JD Holistic Executive Life Coach PS. If you are ready to be challenged, to steer your life in a new direction, and to achieve the goals you desire, I invite you to request a Free Coaching Session and Experience Coaching and How It Can Benefit Your First-hand!

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Goal Setting and Managing

Can you successfully manage your goals?

By Michael Brewster

We all pretty much know that goals are essential to creating success. However, do we know how to effectively manage these goals so that we can not only accomplish them but be successful in doing so?

The down and dirty, straight to the point way for us to successfully manage our goals is to first determine what our goal is. If it is an annual goal, we then need to break it down to quarterly or monthly goals. From there, we continue to break it down into weekly and daily tasks.

What we’re doing, is taking something that is large and overwhelming and breaking it down to easy and manageable milestones. Not only will this allow us to make significant progress toward accomplishing our goal but it will also allow us the ability to track our progress and show accomplishments along the way that we can be proud of.

So overall, when we want to manage our goals to achieve success we must:

• Determine the overall goal
• Break it down to monthly or quarterly goals
• Break it down further to daily and weekly tasks
• Implement these tasks into our daily schedules
• Track the progress toward the accomplishments

Did I mention that we should allow ourselves rewards for the achievement of the success? This may be in the form of accomplishing that goal itself. It could be something as menial as allowing yourself an ice cream or a dinner at your favorite restaurant.

Setting goals is a process of achieving success.  Be sure to set goals that are realistic and that you can achieve but also, set goals that push yourself beyond your comfort zone.  If you do this and you don’t quite achieve your goal you may still find yourself in a better position than when you started.

Here’s to your success.

Michael Brewster has been successfully investing in income producing real estate since 1995.  He is known for mentoring students from coast to coast who wish to achieve a 6 figure income.  Visit www.GetFreeWithRE.com to get his monthly coaching call & Journal absolutely FREE!  (817) 431-0186

I'm really looking forward to working with you to reach new heights of success and balance in your personal and professional life! Sonia Gallagher, JD Holistic Executive Life Coach PS. If you are ready to be challenged, to steer your life in a new direction, and to achieve the goals you desire, I invite you to request a Free Coaching Session and Experience Coaching and How It Can Benefit Your First-hand!

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Time Management for Business Owners

Is Procrastination Killing Your Business?

Are you in the habit of putting things off? Saying to yourself that you will eventually get around to completing a task or are you the type to just get things done no matter what the task that needs to be done is. Unfortunately an alarming number of small business owners are not the type to get things done without coming up with some excuse why they need to procrastinate on critical items in their business or simply taking care of a client. They are the types that simply delay items until a deadline rapidly approaches, a client needs something now urgently which wasn’t urgent at the time they were originally informed them and sometimes they use every creative excuse in the book for not doing something immediately, you know some of the responses “I have no time right now”, “It is not that important” or “leave it on my desk and I will get to it”.

There is a big difference between procrastination and deferring items until you have some additional information in order to make an informed decision.

What happens when you procrastinate? The first thing that comes to mind is an increased level of stress. Perhaps you are the type that takes on every task that is presented to you and maybe you even provide your clients with unachievable deadlines. Stress is something that all procrastinators possess. Their stress levels rise because eventually the tasks that they committed to working on catch up with them and the deadline rapidly comes due. This is why I choose to work earlier in the morning rather than late into the evening. I personally find in the evening hours when I do office tasks it is usually catch up type work, and the morning hours are used for tasks that allow me to be proactive, resulting in achieving my goals or even impressing my clients. This is what I call the Morning Factor; I published an article on this topic a few years back.

When procrastination catches up with you, you can exhibit feelings over being overwhelmed, not knowing where to turn, tasks that have been piling up are now coming due and you can no longer deal with them one at a time, you may try to multi-task which can lead to you not achieving anything properly. Emails are coming in from clients wondering if the expectations that you provided have been met or if they will ever be completed. Maybe your phone is even ringing off the wall with people wondering what is going on with the projects or jobs you have on your plate. Being overwhelmed because of procrastination is somewhere that you do not want to have happen in your small business. This repetitive behaviour may speed up the rate that your ship is sinking, and lead you to feelings of burnout or even deciding just to dump the business and walk away from it.

When all this happens many entrepreneurs start to show a sign of loss of confidence, their self esteem starts to shrink, their health may start to deteriorate, and things on the home front become tense adding to the overall stress of all the other items happening in the business. Eventually, you hit the wall and you may just hang up skates for the last time and your business suffers all because procrastination got the better of you and your business.

However, there are ways to dig yourself out of this or even prevent you and your business from entering Procrastination nation.

• Take Action Now – by taking immediate action on tasks or events instead of saying to yourself that I can do this later will aid in preventing procrastination from taking control of your life.

• Learn to say No – This is a tough one for many entrepreneurs. They all want to say YES and keep piling things onto their plate and setting unrealistic expectations. Take on jobs and responsibilities that you can effectively take care of or even that you want to tackle.

• Practice the 4 D’s – These are critical to your success in small business

• Do It – As we mentioned in take action now, just do it, get it done and don’t dwell on it. Anything worth doing is worth doing correctly and with a sense of urgency.

• Delegate it – If it is a task that someone else can do, and then have someone else do it. There are people in this world that like to do things that you may not like, seek these folks out and have them take over the tasks in your business that you do not like to do. This doesn’t mean forget about it, you still need to keep your finger on the pulse.

• Dump it – If it is something that is not worth doing, and then get rid of it. Many times business owners continue to do tasks that do not serve their business or livelihood well.

• Defer it – Now, before you say “isn’t this procrastination?” No it is not. There are items in your business that you need to defer, to give you adequate time to make a sound business decision or to gather more information.

• Execute, Execute, Execute – This comes back to taking action, it is great to talk a good story and say you do things in your business or personal life, however, true measurement is in the execution and demonstrating results based on your execution. It is important for you to do things in life to dig yourself out of the grasp of procrastination. Achieve goals and rebuild your confidence.

Procrastination will kill your business and your own personal growth if you don’t take decisive action and prevent procrastination from ruling your life and adding additional stress into the life that you are trying to achieve. Procrastination will lessen your sense of fulfillment in the work or services that you provide leading to you questioning your own self worth.

I'm really looking forward to working with you to reach new heights of success and balance in your personal and professional life! Sonia Gallagher, JD Holistic Executive Life Coach PS. If you are ready to be challenged, to steer your life in a new direction, and to achieve the goals you desire, I invite you to request a Free Coaching Session and Experience Coaching and How It Can Benefit Your First-hand!

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