This article is a summary of the podcast episode from Rebecca Robertson’s Money Mastery for Women Podcast available from itunes and directly. Subscribe and listen to the latest in all things finance and wealth creation for women and hear from some incredibly inspirational female leaders too!
Welcome, I am your host Rebecca Robertson to the money mastery and financial planning for women podcast and today we are going to be talking about financial abundance matrix and this is my matrix. I have put together based on the stages of wealth and I have done it with a little bit of a twist because I really believe that for women particularly quite often, it is not a case of what their stage of wealth they are at. It is possibly how they are feeling about it and that has a more of a detriment or relevance to them. So, I have created this circle and the first level and it is not hierarchical, so it is not a circle format because I do not believe in financial hierarchy, I believe in that everyone is equal and we are all succinct working together and therefore it is not in sort of stages, if you like in terms of one being better than the other and although, you know, you will get a feel that you had rather be in the better stage than the worse stage but we can also equally, we can as far as we can go up, we can come back down again. So, it is a circle and it is part of life.
So, the first point of the stages is called evasion. Now this is where really you are in a dependent state, you are avoiding any form of money, you are maybe leaving envelopes in drawers, you are not chain kick checking bank statements, you are maybe only have a very small form of income and that is okay, if it is only a small form but it is maybe only one form of income. So, you are reliant on one thing and it might be even one thing from a partner or a parent or you have got only one job that you can only do on a Saturday for example. So, it is quite a place of limitation and you are in a mindset where you are avoiding any sort of conversations, any sort of need or requirement to be able to grow or build from there and quite often you are in a place of there is a lot of blame going on.
You are often in place of where you are blaming other people you are putting the ownership on to other people and there is no real responsibility for where you are at, and to where you need to go or what needs to be done. It can be a case that you can have some debts at this time and it may be that the income that you have coming in is exceeding the debt is exceeding the amount of income that you have. So, it is not a fun place to be if you are there and, you know, we have all been there, we have all had times at different levels of different purposes where we possibly had those thoughts and feelings and places of financial, the stage of financial wealth and it is then without thinking about, okay what can I do to move things onto the next stage?
So, the next part piece is called conscious, so therefore you start to become more conscious about your spending, about conscious, about what debts you have in place and conscious about how you think and you are feeling about your money. This is where you might have started to look at the debts and put a better plan in place to be able to clear them. Do you have an ultimate goal, it might not have cleared your debts but you are in a place where you feel that you have got you are growing towards them and, you know, these debts can sometimes span a long period of time and it is not always the case that if you have got them, you cannot then move on to the next stage but you certainly at conscious level are able to look at what you have got? How you are paying for them and how you are going to clear them off? And I do not just mean making monthly payments on credit cards.
You may have them increased your revenue that is coming in you, might have maybe got to sort of have a think about what skill sets you can start to think about at work, when it comes to your financial income. Maybe thinking about what the next career step is, you have started to look at your spending habits and start to think about what actually your pet is paying out for. You are reading the bank statements, you are looking at the bills that comes in and you are starting to have a much higher awareness and conscious mindset around, how you are thinking and feeling about things. So, the next level is a sense and this is a real sense of stability and not quite security but from a place of you are got a real plan with your debts they are possibly even paid off. You still might have a mortgage for example but you have got some money to fall back on. There is a buffer in place, if something was to happen and you have got some sense of stability, when it comes to knowing what you have got going out, you have got your money cash flow plots in place.
You know, what more coming in than you have got going out and you have maybe started to think about wills and life insurance and, you know, talking to work about maybe the pension that you got through work and did you say yes or did you say no, and your accountant mentioned something about. You should do something or other and you are starting to get this sort of a sense of stability and you start to feeling yourself, that you have you can breathe above water you are not bobbing up in and out of the water anymore you are feeling sort of, okay a little bit you have got a buoyancy aid on and you are floating comfortably at the top and it does not feel quite so much of a struggle.
What is important here is that we continue to thrive through that period and we do not get to a stage where we potentially could bob back underwater again. So, we have to sort of stay in that area by keeping our, I have got our mind on it and our eye on it. So, it is a bit like if you want to be extremely healthy and, you know, so you stop eating burgers for breakfast, lunch and dinner and you eat much more healthily and you stop drinking maybe so much or you stop smoking for example and then you get there, you get really healthy and then all of a sudden you think, I will not bother with that anymore. I do not need to do that anymore and then you start back to back doing all those bad habits again.
It is the same with money if you are still doing those habits and still doing those things in place then you will start to creep back down, if you like and I do not mean to creep back down in the sense that there is a wrong or a right of where you are? But there is certainly a circle of this, where you can go around in circles and so habits can be constantly re-happening over and over and it is just maybe that there is not a small adjustment that needs to be made to allow yourself to get onto that next phase or create the stability within a phase. So, at this point with this sense of stability like I have mentioned you have maybe started to clear your debt or you certainly have a plan with that debt and it is way to be cleared, it is controllable. You have got more coming in than you have going out and you are in a position where you are sort of feeling that much better about what you are doing?
You might not be quite at the stage of sort of planning for kids to go to university but you are at a point of making sure you have got some buffer and some money in the bank and so, if anything wants to happen you are able to look after yourself. The next stage on from there however is security or reassurance I call it. So, you are feeling real quite reassured in your stance, when it comes to your finances. So, you have got more than just a buffer, you have got some money in the bank, if something was to happen, you know, you could Jackie job in tomorrow and still have three or six months money in the bank and not have to worry about what was going to happen and that figure of reassurance can be different for different people, depending on their risk and how much risk they like to take and how much security will make them feel comfortable and people go through phases of that.
So, sometimes once they have had it a while and they feel like it is going to waste unless you have interest rates being so low, then they can after a while they can then move on to think about how they could grow that money but certainly from an assurance a feeling perspective, you are in a position where you feel secure and you feel like you have not just got a buoyancy aid on but you are in a boat now and there is said to get a hole in that boat or someone have to shoot down your boat with a cannon for you to start sinking again. You would likely have cleared all your debt but maybe still have a mortgage in place, there can be times where good debt’s not, you know, always a bad thing, you know, zero percent debt, if you are borrowing something against using security money or using money that is growing against something that is not being charged very little or no interest rate is not always a bad thing. It is just making sure you are not living beyond your means in regards to supporting that debt and paying it back in reassurance you would be starting to think about, you know, your future a lot more. You would be thinking about paying for the kids to go to university, if that was what you were wanting to do or you would be thinking about paying for private school, you will be thinking longer term about retirement and really having a life plan strategy.
So, lifestyle financial planning I call it and you would not just be thinking about what you have got coming in coming out? You would have a really clear goal, how you are spending on? What you are spending but what I start to see people do in this phase is that they spend unnecessarily and it is because they have got the money, they just spend it and they are not really conscious about what their spending is. They have got some of the bad habits that have been left behind from possibly some past stages of wealth and they have though their bank violence has moved on their mindset has not, and they are still having some of those bad habits in place which actually stifles the growth because you then get to the end of the year or a birthday of some description and you think why are not all that money, where is it all gone and as business owners we can do that as well.
We can spend unnecessarily on things that are not really going to support our growth. but for us to move on to the next phase, which is independence, which is where you are actually not relying on one job or one income or one business, you actually have enough to live off of, without having to… out of choice and it actually does not just support your standard of living but it gives you a level of, okay, I could stop, work tomorrow; and you would still have enough money to live on. That is quite a big jump from being assurance to independent. so you are not relying on parents, you are not relying on partners, you are not relying on one thing of any description and you have all your plans in place and you are able to be at a stage where you have assets that are accumulated; accumulated wealth and accumulating income for you. As business owners, that is not just one business because how long could you do that job for that business for, you do not want to be doing it in your 70s and your 80s.
So it is about creating assets before you get to that point. So a lot of people in business say, I am financially independent.’ financial freedom, which is a terminology I do not particularly like, they are 100 percent reliant on that business. So it is about creating assets outside of that dependence. So you are not having to do podcasts in your 70s or YouTube channel in your 70s. And, you know, we have to move aside for the youngsters at some stage. But you are a point of financial independence where you are more than comfortable and you are able to live a life of, making sort of certain choices. And the stage on from there, you have more than that so you could ‘a drop of a hat’ go and hire a yacht somewhere, which is abundance, and you could go on holiday for a month no one normally did not need to know where you are, like you are bit of a Richard Branson in that respect.
But abundance for me, I have a circle around abundance which sets in the middle, so it overlaps all the other areas because you cannot move on to the next step without having that positive abundance mindset and thinking positively about things; letting go of the past and be able to move on to that next stage. So abundance, for me, does cover all that elements. but to be in true abundance in the financial wealth sense means that you have passive income from all sources, not only to fulfill your lifestyle but albert to grant you freedom and choice to do whatever you want, when you want. So I would love to hear what your thoughts are on this.
I would love to hear in the reviews, where you think that you might be, and where you think that might be relevant for you and what things you could start to do to move yourself on to that next stage. And it is really imperative that whatever you think or feel that might be, is you take some action on it. It is great to learn this stuff, right? but if we do not take the consistent action on a regular basis, to allow ourselves to have that growth, then really, we are only going to recreate those habits over and over again, and repeat the same cycles, not only with ourselves but the family and our children and those around us. I hope you have enjoyed this session. Please leave a review and I would love to hear your feedback. And as always, do share with your friends. Take care.
