On the Offense: Taking Control of Financial Fitness to Improve your Life

On the Offense: Taking Control of Financial Fitness to Improve your Life

It’s never been more important than right now to help my clients understand financial fitness. This involves important financial events in your life, such as owning a home, paying for education and building a nest egg for retirement. There is a lot of financial stress on people at this time in history.

I’m using a book called Financial Fitness: 47 Principles by Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward to help my clients, friends and family understand money. The book contains a section called Financial Offense that contains 17 very useful principles. Financial offense means taking action to increase your income.  In this blog, we’ll cover the first half of the authors’ 17 offensive financial fitness principles.

Financial Fitness Principle #9: Financial fit people are avid readers
Those who deeply understand the workings of money and consistently invest in themselves by learning about financial fitness and financial leadership are the people who figure it out and make it happen. Take time to work on your financial education, skills, experience, knowledge and ability.

Financial Fitness Principle #10: Financially fit people excel at their work and home projects
People who excel at their work—as well as the home projects they are completing right now—are often the same people who are financial fit. Are you doing work and projects at which you excel? If not, maybe you need to make a change. Your success at work and at home will positively influence all areas of your life, including your financial fitness. However, financially fit people also invest in improving themselves to help them reach their long-term vision.

Financial Fitness Principle #11: Never sacrifice your principles for money or passion
Be honest. Keep your integrity. Keep your priorities in the right order. It’s a fact that those who allow money and passion to overshadow their principles do not find the happiness they believe money will lead them to.

Financial Fitness Principle #12: Do the work to gain the mastery
It has been demonstrated that a true master of anything has invested about 10,000 hours in activities surrounding their area of mastery. If you want to become a master of financial fitness, you must commit yourself to spending the time it takes to learn, so you can achieve what you desire.

Financial Fitness Principle #13: Don’t ask “Can we afford it?” Ask “Does this help our purpose?”
Some of the things people can afford to buy become a distraction from their long-term vision, purpose and dreams. Think about how much an indulgence you are considering will cost. Could the money be better spent to help you advance further toward your dreams in the long run? Cultivate the habit of saying “no” even when you can afford to buy what you want.

Financial Fitness Principle #14: Analyze your life and financial habits
Everyone has good and bad habits when it comes to both life and finances. You won’t completely eliminate bad habits, but you can improve your success by analyzing what is keeping you from reaching your goals—and what is helping you reach them when you do. Once you have analyzed your habits, change them as needed to support your financial fitness.

Financial Fitness Principle #15: Own a business
Even if you only begin working on your new business part-time, applying the principles of financial fitness to your own business could help you become wealthy much faster. In part, this is because people care about their own success more than they do for a business that belongs to someone else.

Financial Fitness Principle #16: Increase your passive income
In the life of any financially fit person, there is an effort to turn some financial strength toward passive income—this refers to regular income that requires little effort to maintain it. Set a goal to make most of your income passive (such as gains from investments), and then you can live off of your passive income.

Isn’t it time you went on the offense when it comes to your own financial fitness? Add these six financial fitness principles to the six in my previous blog, and watch for more in the next four blogs. Carefully consider each principle and look for ways you can begin to change your financial habits today.

More Basics to Help You Invite Financial Fitness into your World

More Basics to Help You Invite Financial Fitness into your World

A mortgage is your largest financial liability. It can play a huge part in your success today and in the future, and even your retirement, if handled properly. I made a commitment in 2014 to bring a better understanding of financial fitness to my clients. I want to help them understand money and the power of money, and why it’s important to manage money wisely.

To accomplish this for my clients, I found a book that sums up the path to financial fitness very well. The book is Financial Fitness: 47 Principles by Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward.  I discussed the first of seven basic financial fitness principles in the last article. In this article, I’ll finish presenting basics from the book.

But first I want to expand on principle #5 from the first article. I believe it is one of the most critical financial principles in most people’s lives: budget and plan for unexpected expenses.

Unexpected Expenses Jeopardize Financial Fitness

Medical bills are the number one unexpected expense that cause financial hardship. When you find yourself with large medical bills, it is difficult to pay them back. If you don’t plan ahead for this type of hit to your financial fitness, it will negatively impact your credit scores and your ability to borrow money for a car or house or any other important financial need that arises in your life.

It’s a basic principle of financial fitness to budget, save and plan for unexpected expenses. It’s tempting not to think about it before it happens—after all, you aren’t expecting it! But planning for the unexpected can prevent the loss of your financial health.

More Basic Financial Principles for Financial Health from Woodward and Brady

The following are the final two principles from the section of the Financial Fitness book entitled The Basics of Financial Fitness. Do you see a few items in this and the previous article you could begin working on right now?

Financial Fitness Principle #6: Pay 10% of your income to tithing
Even if your funds are very low, giving 10% of your income “puts you in a mindset of abundance,” say Brady and Woodward. The act of giving puts financial worries into perspective. Even if you have very little, there are always people who have less. Giving gets you in the habit of acting as though you are financially secure.

Financial Fitness Principle #7: Using money to help others naturally increases your happiness
You might believe money will buy you happiness. However, those who know money well know that is not true. On the other hand, using money to help others does help you achieve happiness. In fact, giving often leads to greater financial strength.

Once you’ve mastered the basics of financial fitness and set a foundation for financial success, you can move on to taking offensive action to improve your finances aggressively. We’ll begin talking about your financial offense in the next article.