In my 25 years in business, I have seen and heard a lot. My position makes me a sounding board for my clients. I hear the fun stuff (family, kids, weddings), the not so fun stuff (funerals,divorce) and the random stuff ( “My dad knows a guy who was in the army with Elvis!).
I also hear things that are damaging. Oddly, the damaging statements are usually wrapped in a beautiful package of hope and delight. Or maybe you could call it delusion.
You see, I have made it a habit to carefully observe my clients. I watch their hand movements, their eyes, their body language and their tonality. I then match what is coming out of their mouth to what is coming out of their movements. When you do this for as long as I have ,you can tell a lot about what someone is really saying. You can also learn a lot from watching their spouse. Does the spouse agree with their words? What is their body language saying while their significant other is speaking?
Am I a mind reader? No.
A wanna be psychologist? Maybe. I’ve been called worse.
The truth is that I am a student of human behavior. I need to be in order to serve my clients properly. My job is to address my clients true needs. Not the needs that they think they have.
Many people go through life thinking that everything is peachy even if it isn’t. Focusing on things you may need to change is not what most people do for fun.
People often come to my office to set up an investment account and they leave with a budget. Other times they come in for a mortgage and leave with an investment account. I always assume that someone has come to me because I can help them. So that’s what I do.
So what about the damaging stuff?
Whenever I see a problem, I look for a pattern.
People are creatures of habit. We all do and say the same things over and over. After a while, whatever we tell ourselves is what we become. So how does this relate to a finance blog? Let me explain.
Most financial dilemma’s are created out of our reactions to the patterns that we follow. We follow the pattern, it works for a while and then something happens; a recession, lower property values, a layoff etc. This re shifting event shows us the hole in our pattern. Maybe we spend most of what we make never thinking to save a percentage of our income for later. The shift happens, we temporarily find ourselves out of work and we have nothing to fall back on.
Maybe we do save our money but we don’t know how to save it properly. 10 years later we find ourselves with less money than we started with because we were too aggressive or too passive.
What is really amazing is how closely our issues match that of our parents. Many of us grew up with parents that paid little or no attention to money. They always found themselves in a financial bind. The next generation comes and we find ourselves in the same position. Or maybe we go to the opposite extreme and we work so hard so we are never in our parent’s position. With excessive hard work comes hard playing as a reward. That attracts the same type of friends and before we know it, we are carrying on in ways that will kill any chance to have any savings for the future. We don’t worry about it because we know how to make money. Then that darn re shifting thing shows up. You may presume that the re shifting event will put an end to our pattern. Wake us up maybe. Unfortunately, usually the opposite is true. Sure we may temporarily close it down a bit. Cut back a little. But it never seems to last for most of us. Sacrifice is not learned in a few months. It is learned over a lifetime.
You either live a disciplined life or you don’t. You invest wisely or you don’t. There is no halfway or middle ground to common sense. Oh, and then there is that Ego thing. That’s a tough one. You see, once that Ego is attached to new cars, nice trips, new shoes and the best restaurants, it becomes quite a struggle to get Mr. Ego to go along with our new plan. Sure, we can all justify a little slowdown in our spending as “temporary”, but a long term shift is a whole different kettle of fish. Our Egos tell us what to spend, where to go, how to look and who to play with. I have not come across many Egos that tell their slave how much to save!
Your Ego doesn’t like budgets, savings or well thought out financial planning. So the first step in having a happy financial life is not to be a slave to your Ego. How do you do it? Acknowledge your Ego. Sit quietly and think about why you do the things you do. What is your relationship with money? Write down the answers and look at them again in a few days.
To be continued………………………………
