Have you ever felt like your dreams are trapped behind a paycheck?
Think about this:
You’re working a job that you don’t necessarily like, because that’s the only way for you to get by.
You constantly feel like you’re not making enough money, no matter how much you make.
You keep buying things you don’t even want, but you think you need because that’s what everyone else is doing.
You have a dream that you want to pursue at some point in the future, but there’s no way you can act on it now because you need the money and stability that your job offers.
So you keep postponing and postponing, unable to take the first step you know you HAVE TO take in order to ever achieve your goals.
That was me about 2 years ago; and in this video, I’ll show you how I started using my 9-5 income with intention, clarity and focus to design a life that I want, which allowed me to quit my job a few months ago and start this YouTube channel.
If you’re one of the millions of people who can’t give their dreams a shot due to financial reasons, you’re going to want to take notes.
And don’t worry, you’re not going to leave thinking you need to make more money.
I find this really interesting:
Although the impact of money depends entirely on how we use it just like any other tool, many of us attach deep emotions and expectations to it because we’re influenced by our family, friends, colleagues and social media.
Since money isn’t taught in schools, these expectations end up guiding our financial decisions instead of what we actually want for ourselves.
We’re born believing we should comply with these norms, we build our entire lives around them, and spend our hard-earned money trying to sustain a life that we don’t even want to live.
But in the next 7 minutes or so, you’ll be changing that narrative for yourself.
The first thing you need to do is to reflect on the things you think you “should” do about money.
Think about all the expectations from your environment, all the status symbols that drain your bank account, all the things that you shouldn’t talk about.
All the ways you feel pressured to spend and not spend your money.
This will take some time, so feel free to pause the video and finish the exercise.
Now if you don’t want to be in the same place as you are in a couple of years, you need to stop letting these expectations dictate your financial decisions.
Think of what you want for yourself instead.
Which of these expectations align with your goals?
Which of them don’t?
Keep what you need to keep, and don’t be afraid to lose the ones you must lose.
I recently had to skip a close friends’ wedding because I’m living off of the savings I built working my ass off to buy myself a year, so you’ll need to make sacrifices.
Not to mention, none of those sacrifices are bigger than the current one you’re making by wasting your life on something you hate.
So stick to the plan.
Once you’re done cleaning out your closet with your own expectations, the next step is to start writing your own money story with what YOU think you should do.
You-know-who once famously said “Do not save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving.”
I can’t stress how much of a difference this makes in taking control of your finances enough.
I mean, look at how much I was able to save and invest in the entire year of 2022, and compare it to 2023 where I started allocating my resources purposefully and paying myself first, all while making almost the same salary.
But when we look at this amount that we pay ourselves as just savings or investments, we’re actually missing the point.
This is the money that we can use to design the life that we want for ourselves.
Think of it this way:
If you want to move to a new country, you can use this money to make that move.
If you want to switch to a new career, you can use this money on courses to develop your skill set.
If you want to start your own business like I wanted to, you can become your own angel investor and use it as your seed money that will fund you for a year.
So it’s not just savings or investments, but it’s actually what helps you build your ideal life.
It’s your capital that allows you to make a choice about your own future.
And it’s entirely under your control.
How cool, and frightening is that?
Okay, here’s an extremely easy way for you to calculate this capital:
On one side, you have your take-home pay, which is the income from your job plus any other side hustles if you have them.
On the other side, you have your monthly expenses to keep living life in your current standard.
These would be your housing, groceries, utilities, transportation, subscriptions, personal spendings and so on.
If you really want to make sure that you build your ideal life around a capital that you actually have at all times, feel free to add some buffer by increasing the total of your expenses by 10 to 15%.
Now, just subtract the total of your monthly expenses from your take-home pay.
This is the money you have left to pay yourself every month.
This is your moving, career-switching, business-starting or whatever capital of choice.
If you don’t have much left, don’t worry, we’ll adjust that later.
Congratulate yourself for a second for doing this, because you’re already ahead of most people who don’t even know where they stand financially.
And once you’ve done that, create another account through your bank’s app, and move this exact amount of money to that account as soon as you get your paycheck.
Every month.
Before even buying a cup of coffee.
Just doing this consistently for one and a half years gave me the opportunity to take a chance in my life.
Once you commit to this process, I promise you’ll wonder why you haven’t done it sooner.
But, you know, shit happens.
So if you ever find yourself having to use the money from your capital for emergencies, make sure to put it right back next month in addition to what you should already pay yourself that month.
And if you realize that you’re having to do this often, go back and recalculate your capital.
Alright, now you know where you are.
The next step is to decide where you want to go.
This part takes a lot more reflection than the first, so I’m not going to dive too deep into this here.
But what you essentially need to do is imagine a typical day in your ideal week.
This could be 1 year from now; 2 years, 5 years, or 10 years from now.
And don’t worry about how you’ll get there, just imagine what it looks like.
Where do you wake up?
How do you start your day?
What work are you doing?
How do you feel when you check your bank account?
This will be your compass, so the more detailed and clear your answers are, the stronger your why will be for the final part.
And don’t worry if your vision is overwhelming, or already feels impossible to achieve.
It’s not going to come alive overnight, but it will as a result of many small steps that you take with intention.
Once you have a clear vision, you need to pick just one piece of that vision that you want to turn into reality.
And once you have that too, you need to define the first step that you need to take towards making that piece real.
We’re setting an actual goal here, so you’re going to want to make the action as clear as possible, attach a timeline to it, and also a monetary value to it.
You can do this by using a statement like this:
“I will spare [insert monetary value] towards [insert action] over the next [insert timeline] because this will allow me to [insert impact on the selected piece of your vision].”
For me, it looked something like this:
“I will spare €30K towards building my seed fund over the next 18 months because this will allow me to quit my job and become a full-time YouTuber.”
Fill this statement out for yourself, and put it on your wall.
And finally, look at the number you put in that statement, and think how you can get there with the amount you pay yourself every month.
Remember when I said “Don’t worry if you don’t have much capital left after subtracting your spendings, because we’ll adjust it later?”
This is the part where we adjust it.
What you want to do is maximize the amount you pay yourself to make this vision a reality.
If it takes you 6 months to save up for a networking event that will help you take your career to the next level, but you want to get there even faster, you can do this by either increasing your earning potential or decreasing your costs.
You can try to increase your earnings through negotiating your salary, or even better, getting a new job.
You can try to create additional income streams that you could see yourself doing.
You can also have your capital work harder by investing a portion of it, though it comes with its own risks.
But the easiest and safest way to do this is to reduce your expenses instead, and redirect that money towards your vision fund.
And we hadn’t even tried the first time, so there’s room to improve.
Look at your non-essential spendings, and eliminate the ones you can in order to increase the amount you pay yourself monthly for your vision.
You can efficiently do this by asking whether a specific spending aligns with your vision.
If it does, keep it.
If it doesn’t, cut it out.
And if there’s still no way you can make that piece of your vision a reality with your adjusted capital amount, you can either pick a different piece of your vision that sounds more realistic at the moment, or adjust your timeline.
And that’s it!
That’s how you fix your finances for good, and be able to take a chance on yourself.
Now you have no excuse not to chase your dreams, and no reason not to believe you can actually do it.
I can comfortably say this because that’s exactly how I started chasing mine, so feel free to subscribe and share this journey with me.
And let me know how it felt to make that first transfer to your vision fund in the comments below.
If money is not the reason why you can’t take the first step, but you just don’t know where to start, you might want to watch this video next.
Hope you learned something from this one, and I’ll see you next time.
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