Money Musings 💭 when saying “no” is self care
You all know I’m a huge believer in boundaries. By boundaries I mean protecting our time, energy, and money so we can focus on the things that are most important to us.
As a recovering people pleaser, saying no to things is really hard. I want to support people. I want to be generous with my expertise.
And to add to it, I usually ACTUALLY want to do the thing I’m saying no to. I’m a big optimist. I see the potential in every opportunity. In my business, that means an opportunity that might help me grow my business. In my personal life, it might be an event that I genuinely want to go to because it’s for a friend or I think it will be really fun.
Because it’s felt like our social lives and in-person business lives have been essentially on pause for the last year and a half, there’s a sentiment in the air around making up for lost time. And it’s legitimate.
I have friends and family I haven’t seen in years, a laundry list of activities that’s been building up.
As my business and family has grown and my free time has diminished, I often find myself saying no to things I WANT to do but that aren’t top priority for me. And wow, this focus is hard.
But it preserves my energy (which benefits everyone around me) and it gives me the opportunity to much better enjoy and cherish the things I say yes to.
When I first started saying no to things, my skills were laughable. It was a knee-jerk reaction no. It was not graceful. There was no finesse. I got it done but people were probably pretty put off by it.
While I still have plenty of room to improve, something that’s really helped me is just sharing honestly. I share how I would really LOVE to do it and how it’s going to kill me to miss it (all true), but that I need to focus on X, Y, Z right now.
Have you experienced the making up for lost time surge? How have you coped and protected your time, energy and money?
MONEY MOVE OF THE WEEK
CELEBRATE HOW FAR YOU’VE COME!
It’s so easy to get caught up in where we want to be that we often forget to celebrate 🥳 how far we’ve already come. I see this happen in my own life when it comes to my money and my business.
Although it’s important to have goals and to check in to make sure we’re on track, it’s just as important to enjoy the progress and reward yourself for your accomplishments.
Take a few minutes to reflect: how far have you come in the past 5 years? The past year? 6 months? Month? How has your business evolved? Are you saving more money than you were before? How does your retirement account compare to a year ago?
Progress isn’t always linear, so we’ll certainly experience down periods even when we’re on the road to success.
What’s something you’re proud of accomplishing in your money life recently? Take time to celebrate that this week.
YOU GOTTA SEE THIS
DEFINE: Expense Ratio
An expense ratio is a fee that comes with investing in funds (i.e. a basket of investments you can own shares of). Almost every fund will have an expense ratio that is a percentage fee that you are charged each year for owning the fund. It covers the costs to manage the fund.
You won’t have to send payment anywhere because the money will just be withdrawn from your investment account.
If the expense ratio is 0.15% and your retirement investments are $50K, you’ll pay $75 per year. .
If this doesn’t make sense, think of it this way: If you are paying a fee of 1% and your portfolio earned 8% that year, you only get to keep 7% of those earnings. Some funds have high expense ratios It depends on the type of fund, but I typically consider anything above 0.5% to be high and I try to keep it well below that.