Forming a Life Statement

In the financial world you will come across all manner of people and ideas marketed professionally and designed to get you excited, and ultimately steer you away from your goal of Financial Independence, here is how to avoid that happening.

Firstly you need a plan, you need to sit down and decide what it is you want to achieve from a very high level, and then drill down into pieces that are tangible and can be tracked.  If you don’t know what you want, then you cannot know when you are going off the path and bumbling about with your financial future.  The most important thing to keep in mind throughout all this talk of money and finances is that money is a tool, it is a barometer of how successfully you are living your life and it is an enabler to achieving things within your life.  The very first stepping in planning and controlling your own success is not money related, it is the intangibles of feeling you are an accomplished person, to help turn those into a plan that you can track and tweak I think it best to start with forming a Life Statement.

Your Life Statement is the 30,000 ft statement of where you want to be and what you want to achieve, I am going to write my Life Statement today and start drilling it down to tangibles.  I have done something like this in the past, but it is important to rethink and revisit such things periodically as your views and priorities change as you move through life.  A Life Statement should be individual and unique, but will contain the following factors:

• Financial Goal – Not a number, but the level of independence and lifestyle you desire, the number will be calculated later as to what is required to achieve and maintain this lifestyle.
• Family Goal – Where you see yourself within the family unit, single, married, Patriarch or Matriarch.
• Personal Goal – What you see in terms of personal achievements such as education formal or informal as a subject matter expert.  Skills learnt and experiences tasted, such as climbing a mountain or learning to scuba dive or paint.
• Altruistic Goal – How far your sphere of influence should reach, both in terms of financially supporting those around you, and also investiture of time and resources for the betterment of your community and society.  This could be from helping immediate family to supporting aid efforts in foreign lands.

When you form the plan you don’t have to be ‘realistic’ put down what your dream is, then we’ll crunch the numbers on achieving the dream and make it a monthly amount to get from here, to goal.  If when you do that you might feel that it isn’t feasible for now and therefore a smaller, intermediate goal might be helpful.

However, don’t shoot low, you will be amazed at what can be achieved when you set your mind to it, and if you have a plan, your ability to achieve is really only limited by your desire and imagination.  I would be willing to bet if you set an aggressive goal now that is mapped out over a 5 year plan by year 5 you will be in a position to reevaluate and aim the bar even higher than you did the first time and way beyond what you think is possible.

Once formed, share your life statement with a loved one or confidant.  This vocalization will empower you to realize the plan and take the steps to achieve it.  If you ever encounter mockery regarding the statement do not accept it, if that person is important to you then make them realize the power of this statement and its importance to you, if they do not support it then you need to remove that person from your life.  This sounds harsh, but I grew up in a culture where success was frowned upon and mocked and fighting through the sludge of that is going to make your mission to take control of your life and financial independence ten times harder.