Understanding Yourself and Your Money
By: Miles Clark
Tags: College, Finance, Dreams, Money

“One day… one day I will have everything I could ever dream of.”

How often have you told yourself that? It might be a fast car, big house, exotic vacations, perfect family, or anything else one could see in their wildest dreams. To each one of us, that dream is clear as day.

The path to get to that “one day,” however, is much more foggy. Riddled with road blocks, distractions, and traffic jams, the road to our dreams seems to take the backseat to the day to day struggles of living a now very real and adult life. Gone are the days of dreaming about being an astronaut or driving fancy cars, when all we can think about is waking up on time for class, eating healthy, and maybe scraping up enough cash to have some remnants of a social life on the weekends. The “one day” we all dreamed about fades into the darkness, killed by reality and normalcy.

So what can we do? Accept it? Understand that we cannot be one of the few who have the freedom to chase lofty goals and live life to the fullest? Let life pass by while we fall victim to the rat race we have found ourselves in? No. There has to be a way to salvage our dreams.

The answer lies in knowing yourself. Knowing your habits. Knowing your skills (and weaknesses.) What are your passions? What are your moral values? What gets you out of bed in the morning? The answer will be different for all of us.

When you know yourself, you can plan ahead. With a proper plan, those “dreams” we all had growing up turn into very achievable and measurable “goals.” With a plan, the path to the future of our dreams gets a little less crowded. We can plan for mistakes, plan for unforeseen circumstances, plan for the hurdles life throws at us, big or small. But those goals are hard to identify if you don’t know yourself first.

So that will be the topic of today’s blog: How can I get to know myself?

Let’s start small. Ask yourself one simple question: What do I like to do? The answer might be exercising, cooking, investing, reading, video games… anything! What draws you to that specific activity? Is it the idea of working on or bettering yourself, or the idea of creating a finished product you are satisfied with? Maybe you just like to be better than your friends at whatever the newest game at the time is. Knowing your interests (and why you like those things to begin with) all allow you to understand yourself more, and can allow you to create specific, achievable goals based around those interests.

For example, take two individuals who play sports. One plays because they like idea of being the best version of themself on the field or court, and the other simply likes the feeling of crushing their opponent on game day. Although their shared goal is to win, their path in practice and workouts to get to that end goal will look and feel significantly different for each one of them.

Life is no different. Our paths to each one of our dreams will vary greatly on who we are as a person, what and who motivates us, and why we like the things we do. If you can identify why you are drawn to your interests, you can tailor fit your end goal to something specific to you.

Let’s go a step further. As this page is about personal finances, let’s talk about money and goals. How many dreams have died right off the bat because of the costs associated with them?

“It would be cool to start a business… but I don’t have the money right now.”

“Man, I would love to travel Europe… but I don’t have the money right now.”

“Saving for a dream house would be awesome… but I don’t have the money right now.”

Do you see the common denominator? We aren’t plagued by a lack of dreams, but merely a lack of ways to fund them. The ones with true freedom simply have the means to be able to end the sentence without the “but” that prevents you and I from getting there. So how can we move towards doing the same? The answer is no different than the scenario with the two sports players from before. We must know ourself. The answer to knowing yourself financially boils down to three key questions.

1). How much money do you bring in a month?

2). How much money do you spend each month?

3). How much money do you need to spend each month?

Having the ability to chase our dreams financially comes from maximizing the distance between questions 1 & 3, and then putting that excess income to work for us. In writing, it sounds simple, but in practice… well in practice it’s easy to trip up, and being disciplined in not letting our short term wants overshadow our long term goals is hard to do consistently.

These three questions (along with the bonus fourth: putting the excess to work for us) will be a major topic of discussion in future posts. For now, we must be satisfied with getting to know ourself and setting realistic goals based on our intrinsic motivators and interests. From there, we will work on creating budgets and paths to make those end goals a much more tangible reality over time. It is through using these tools we will be discussing over the next posts that we can bring back our dreams from when we were little, and make sure that we are enjoying the life we have. When money works for you instead of against you, and you have clear goals that are based in your own personal interests, you can move towards the future you always told yourself you would have.

Thank you for reading.