Today’s Topic: Mapping out financial goals
As we record, Kim’s eating grapes from the grapevine at the back of our Airbnb in Montenegro. After our 4-month Europe trip we’re moving to California, which is way more expensive than Georgia, where we used to live, so in this episode, Kim and I talk about our financial goals and how we plan to achieve them. We just started using a system we learnt from one of our mentors.
The system is super simple. You have three financial buckets. Bucket 1 is about safety and security, bucket 2 is about comfort and pleasure and bucket 3 is called the baller bucket and it’s about your wild and audacious financial goals.
The idea is that you fill the buckets in order. First you do the safety and security bucket. And that means you’re ridding yourself of any debt, you’re saving for any emergencies. Then, once that bucket is full, then you move into your comfort and pleasure bucket. And that’s when you get to pay off your house and you can buy the car that you want and do those things that are all about building comfort and pleasure. And then you move to the baller bucket.
Let’s say you’ve got $10,000 a month that you’re paying in debt. Well, once that debt is paid off, then you’ve freed up 10,000 bucks a month to be able to put towards the comfort and pleasure bucket. So as you’re accomplishing different goals, it has a snowball effect and, before you know it, you’ve got an avalanche.
In thinking about our buckets, we’ve mapped out what we want to do and how we have to fund those buckets. Part of the strategy is that we have multiple income streams.
This kind of clarity around our goals has really helped us and we’ve discovered that by focusing on one goal, we actually accomplish all kinds of other goals. For example, we used to have individual vision boards but then we decided to make one together and focus on one goal, moving our family to the South Bay Hermosa Beach area by August 2019. To do that we had to sell my clinic. What ended up happening is we did that and then things that were on Kim’s vision board, living in Italy and traveling in Europe, became possible too.
