In this episode, we discuss the importance of planning out your goals.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the importance of planning out your future. You have to realize that one minute of planning can save you ten minutes of execution time. So if you plan properly, then you can save yourself a lot of time. That ten minutes to plan out your future can save you an hour of trying to fix something in the future. I know I tried to fix somethings around my apartment in the past and I ended up making a bigger mess than if I would plan out more. Kind of like that old saying, measure twice, cut once. I remember putting up some shelves and the shelves were not in the right spot. So I had to take them down and move them, which left a hole in the wall that needed to be covered up. This could have been avoided if I spent the five minutes to think about how it would look in the first place. But I just ended up working longer than those five minutes of planning in the end.
We should also take some time and plan out our future. We should ask ourselves when do we want to retire and how much do we want to have in retirement. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, I would just choose the number 62 because that’s the age you can start taking social security and the number 70 because that’s the age you have to start taking social security. For the Amount, I would just take the salary you have now. Don’t go for a higher amount. From these three data points, we can see what is it going to take to retire, and then we can start formulating a plan on how to get there. Most of this just requires you to put money in your investment accounts like a 401k or an IRA but there are other things that we have to plan for but there will prevent a lot of problems if you do this as early as possible. I’ve seen people who haven’t saved anything and were in their 60s and it is not much you can do but work longer.
To prevent this scenario from happening in your life, just take some time to plan out your life because when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. We can’t prepare for every moment because some things are very unpredictable like seeing a shark at the beach, the best thing is just to swim away as fast as you can. But there are other things that should be planning for you. Just ask yourself what type of life do you want to have. What kinds of job do you want to have, how often to you want to travel, do you want to be in charge of other people, what is the type of salary you want, how far do you want your commute to be, and how much time do you want to spend with friends and family. Once you have a clear picture of this, then you can start working backward. Ask yourself you want this type of job and so you need this type of education to get that job. Then you should take time to research those jobs and see if they are really for you. You don’t want to make a mistake like myself and spend over $100k on business expenses and it ends up not working.
At my last firm, I didn’t really plan it out all the way and it cost me money. I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into but I can say that I learned a lot of valuable information and even though I didn’t pay anything out of pocket for my formal education, I did pay for my informal business education over four years. Since my expenses were so out of control for my last business, I glad I was able to pivot out of that situation because it got worse. Thinking back on this situation, would it have been better to work under someone else or continue to work for me. I like the idea of working for myself and I did learn a lot about running a business and what I should and shouldn’t be doing along with what I enjoy and don’t enjoy. I know I’m going to be fine but I also made some mistakes by trying to do too much at once. I was trying to write a book, run a business, and be in a relationship at the same time and it was just too stressful to handle. It was just a struggle from month to month. I listen to a podcasts about financial advisors and I was told a lot of statistics about becoming a financial advisor and I guess I’m glad I heard this later in my career than at the beginning because maybe I wouldn’t have done it like 90% of financial advisors don’t make it the first year, and the ones that do make, already have a book of business to help them out. I was just trying to figure out how to do things for the first time and I just didn’t know. I heard on many other podcasts, it’s typically not your first business that works out, it’s the third or fourth one. Now I’m on my fourth business with Grow With Joe and I have a lot of knowledge of what not to do and what to do. So sometimes you can’t plan things out and you just have to jump. If you get hurt, you can heal and get stronger the next time around.
But overall, a good rule of thumb is to take some time to plan things out. If you don’t plan things out you can get a scenario like Fyre Festival. Everything looks cool on the surface, but then things slowly get more and more out of control and the whole thing will end out a mess. I watched the Hulu and Netflix versions of the documentary and they are both really good but they spent six months trying to put together a festival that should of taken 15 months to plan out and they just made mistake after mistake trying to make it successful and the boss in my opinion just let his ego get in the way. I would of been pissed if that happened to me and I lost my money on the trip. When you do make a plan, make sure to give yourself some wiggle room so you don’t have to make any rash judgments because things will typically take longer and cost more than you expect. The is known as Schroder’s Law. There will be something that will happen to your plans that will slow it down, it can be the weather, it could be health-related, something with the national economy, or a friend or co-worker could of dropped the ball because something out of their control. So don’t expect your plan to go smoothly and expect it to be revised but at least you can quickly get back on track with a plan.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize when you fail to plan, plan to fail so make sure you have some sort of plan. It doesn’t need to be a perfect plan but you need to have sort of plan. If you don’t know how to create a plan, go see a professional like me and I can help you out.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode.
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