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How to Start Your Financial Dream Plan

How to Start Your Financial Dream Plan

by | Jun 1, 2022 | Work Well

Don’t know where or how to start with planning your financial future? You are not alone. This is the most common email request I receive so I thought it warranted a blog post. To create a Financial Dream Plan, you need to know what you want. This can be a difficult exercise. We are often challenged with verbalizing our desires or imagining our future self. We have a notion of what we want but when asked we can’t provide specific details. And for dreams to come true, they need to be specific.

Here are two fun ways to start dreaming about your future:

1.Plan a Dream Vacation completely budgeted on paper.

Go all out. Where do you want to go? How long will you be gone? Alone or does someone go with you? Pick a time of year, research flight routes and costs. Plan the itinerary. Where will you stay? Accommodations vary based on your dream (i.e. Backpacking, Airbnb or Luxury Resort). What kind of activities will you do? Are you going for adventure or relaxation? What kind of food will you eat? Who will you meet? What kind of memories will you make?

2. Plan your Perfect Day by the hour starting when you wake to when you fall asleep.

Would you wake automatically or to an alarm? Would you have a morning routine?

How about exercise, meditation or gratitude? What about journaling? Would you eat breakfast? If yes to breakfast, what would you eat? Be specific!

What time would you arrive to work? Do you have a commute or work from home? What kind of meetings do you attend? Or do you volunteer? Plan it all out…snacks, meals, cocktails or not. Do you meet up with friends? Play sports? Watch TV? Take a walk or have sex with your partner? You decide. It’s totally your Perfect Day.

This exercise works best the more specific you can be. You may want to create a Pinterest Board for visual representation of your Dream Vacation or write out your entire Perfect Day in your journal. I encourage doodling in the margins of your journal since doodling activates big picture thinking.

Your Dream Vacation and Perfect Day will be as unique as you are. When you start this process, it engages your planning brain (and you’ll need it firing on all cylinders to create your Financial Dream Plan). Most days we live our day the same way we did the day before, almost in default. This is common as our primitive brain likes consistency.

That consistency can make us feel stuck though, especially around our finances. How are we growing in knowledge and wealth if we are following the same process as the prior day, week after week?

This is where activating your planning brain with a fun exercise like a Dream Vacation or Perfect Day starts to get you to think about the future and what do you really want. Your brain can then move onto your finances.

After the Dream Vacation or Dream Day exercise, now write out three financial goals:

  1. this month, I will:
  2. this year, I will:  
  3. within the next five years, I will:

How much money do you want to earn? How are you going to provide value to earn that amount? How will you mindfully spend your money? How much will you intentionally save and invest? What kind of financial life do you want to live? Do you want to leave a legacy or are you all about YOLO (you only live once)?

There is no right answer. There is YOUR answer. Write it out. I read that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down. Just think, you may get that Dream Vacation and Perfect Day after all.

If you need assistance with your Financial Dream Plan, keep an eye out for the Financial Wellness Workshops provided by Tillamook County Wellness coming this fall 2022. A written plan will save you hours of worry and thousands of dollars over your lifetime. Plus, you’ll be 42 percent more likely to achieve it and that is good for your health!

AUTHOR: Liz Carroll, Financial Life Coach

Other wellness questions? Email us at info@tillamookcountywellness.org. For more local health and wellness information, visit www.tillamookcountywellness.org or follow Tillamook County Wellness on Facebook and Instagram.

Financial Wellness: The Basics of Budgeting

Financial Wellness: The Basics of Budgeting

by | Feb 16, 2022 | Work Well

When we think about our wellness, diet, exercise, and mental health come to mind. In today’s post, we share why your finances should be added to that list – a concept known as “financial wellness.” There is more to cover on this topic than what can fit in a single blog post, so keep an eye out for more information on financial wellness in the future!

A plan for physical wellness might include signing up for a yoga class or doing meal prep on Sundays to make eating healthy easier during the week. A plan for financial wellness includes utilizing tools, as well as developing an understanding of how stress and emotions can play a role in sticking to the plan. Let’s start with one of the most important tools: budgeting. Budgeting keeps track of your income and expenses over a period of time and provides you with information to build long term financial goals, like retirement savings. The elements of a monthly budget include:

  • Income (any money coming in, like a paycheck),
  • Fixed expenses (things that you need to pay for each month like rent, a mortgage, groceries, credit card bill and the power bill)
  • Flexible expenses (things that you don’t have to pay for, but may occur, such as eating out, a Netflix account or buying a ticket to the movies)
  • Unplanned expenses (fixing a vehicle or medical bills are examples. You can use past receipts and records to make an estimate of what these expenses might work out to on a monthly timeframe)
  • Savings (this includes short term savings that can be used in an emergency, as well as long term savings that might be used to purchase a car, or go towards retirement).

While this can be done easily with pen and paper, using a spreadsheet on a computer makes keeping track and updating your budget much easier. On paper (or the computer), try creating a different column for each category and list all of the items that fall under them. It can be helpful to list items in descending order with the highest dollar items at the top to make it easier to see what is having the greatest impact. Once you have the figures or estimates for these buckets you can put them together to form your budget. First, add up all of your expenses (fixed, flexible, unplanned) with your savings, we will call this Total expenses. Subtract Total expenses from your Income and you are left with what is called Net Income. If you have more money coming in each month than going out, your Net Income will be a positive number. With that number you can estimate what your Net income will be in two months, two years or two decades! The accuracy of that estimate will be less over time, as your income and expenses change, so a monthly budget might be best for estimating up to a few years.

(Total Income) – (Total Expenses) = Net Income

With a positive Net income, you can imagine a future of taking family vacations, going to college, or getting a drift boat. This can make you feel more secure, optimistic, and motivated to reach those goals. Unfortunately, many Americans are finding that at the end of the month more money has gone out than has come in, leaving their budget with a negative Net income. This can happen for a number of reasons including paying a disproportionate amount of your monthly income for things like rent, unexpected expenses, loss of income, or more recently, increasing inflation can play a role. In our next post, we will explore how financial uncertainty can cause stress (impacting your overall health), and what you can do to manage it and take steps toward improving your financial wellness. 

AUTHOR: Brett Buesnel, AmeriCorps VISTA at Tillamook County Community Health Center

Other wellness questions? Email us at info@tillamookcountywellness.org. For more local health and wellness information, visit www.tillamookcountywellness.org or follow Tillamook County Wellness on Facebook and Instagram