With all the distractions in today’s constantly-connected world, one of the things young people have trouble with when it comes to planning their financial future is sitting down, focusing, and figuring out where they want to go in life.

Maybe it’s because it’s intimidating to think about the future.

Maybe it’s because it’s easier not to make goals for yourself so that you don’t have anything you can fail at.

Maybe you feel like you don’t know the first thing about your finances so you choose to do nothing instead of learning. You live for today and hope that tomorrow you’ll wake up and find yourself in a better situation all of a sudden.

If you truly want to be successful financially, you’re going to have to put in a lot of hard work. As we go through life, we see the results of hard work all around us, but we rarely see the actual work that went into achieving all this that occurs behind the scenes. Ask anyone that is self-made wealthy how hard they had to work to achieve the level of financial success they’ve achieved. I think their answer will surprise you.

Success Requires Hard Work and Motivation

To start on your own path to building wealth, you can’t be ignorant and you can’t be lazy. You have to find a way to motivate yourself so that you wake up day after day ready to take on the world and win instead of waking up every morning having lost the fight before it even begins.

How do you motivate yourself and keep yourself motivated? By having dreams to aspire toward. By knowing where you want to end up. By knowing what you’re putting forth all this hard work for. When you know why you’re waking up everyday, you wake up energized and excited because you know you’re working toward a better life for yourself. You’re able to focus better because you know what activities are getting you closer to achieving your goals and which activities are simply wasting your time and impeding your progress.

Defining Your Dreams

That’s great you say, but what exactly do I need to do to get started down the path to improving my finances, building wealth, and succeeding financially?

Here’s the first thing you need to do. Make a list of your dreams. Your dreams are what you want your life to be like in the future. It includes how you want to be, what you want in your life, what you want to be doing, how you want to feel, and what you ultimately want to have achieved. Actually write them down, don’t just think of them and plan on remembering them. You won’t. You’ll forget them.

If that’s not motivation enough to make you write them, check this out. By writing them down, something powerful happens that you may not be aware of. When you write them down, they aren’t just figments of your imagination anymore. They are there physically in front of you, holding you personally accountable for achieving them. This accountability will help fuel the fire inside you use to over come obstacles and make sure you get to the life you want.

If you’ve done this, congratulations. You’ve just taken the first step toward achieving a life of wealth and success. That being said, there’s a lot more work to be done. Join me over the next several posts as I go over the rest of the steps.

Does it seem like every time you go to the grocery store, you end up spending more than you thought you would?

If you were in a financial pinch, would you be able to cut back on your food expenses in order to stay afloat?

Wouldn’t it be great to save money effortlessly on your purchases instead of having to go through the trouble of clipping or printing coupons?

If you want to be equipped with the knowledge to save some money on food and other purchases, then this week’s post is definitely one to read.

Topics included in this post:
The Rising Cost of Food
Eating as Inexpensively as Possible
New Deals Platform from American Express

The Rising Cost of Food

While other expenses such as housing, entertainment, and utilities can be reduced by either downgrading or shrinking consumption, food is one of those expenses where this all gets a little complicated.

You obviously can’t stop eating altogether, and cutting down on the amount of food you eat doesn’t seem healthy unless, of course, you over-eat constantly to begin with. It also probably wouldn’t be a good idea to save money by eating fast food all the time, as this would cause your health to suffer and you’d end up spending more on medical care. Add to this the fact that food prices are seemingly rising faster than ever before, and you’ll find yourself asking, “What’s a person to do?”

Investopedia published an article this week that will arm you with 22 ways to combat rising food prices. They suggest some conscious things you can do to make it less likely that you’ll overspend at the grocery store, such as going with a list, a full stomach, no kids, and plenty of coupons. Other suggestions have to do with where you buy such as buying from local farmer’s markets or buying from bulk retailers like Costco or Sam’s Club.

Check out all Investopedia’s suggestions – 22 Ways To Fight Rising Food Prices

Eating as Inexpensively as Possible

Fellow personal finance blogger, Krystal Yee from Give Me Back My Five Bucks, looks into one way of tackling this issue – by attempting to slash her grocery budget to $100 this month.

I like what she’s doing on multiple levels. First, I like that she’s trying to save money on something that I think is difficult for most people to save money on these days. Second, I like the mindset she takes of viewing this as a sort of challenge. And finally, I like that she’s doing this to prove to herself that she could survive on a small amount of money in case something happens and she finds herself in a tough spot financially.

I think planning for emergencies is an important part of a personal financial strategy and something that people don’t always think about when looking at their finances. This a great example of someone consciously putting forth the time and effort to plan.

Check out Krystal’s post – Can you feed yourself for $100/month?
And her follow-up post showing how she’s doing it – Inside my grocery bag

New Deals Platform from American Express

Groupon and Living Social have recently become household names for those looking for bargains in their vicinity. Now consumers will have another way to save and local businesses will have another option available to them to get more business out of their local consumers.

American Express has partnered with Facebook to create The American Express Network. What is the American Express Network you ask?

From the AMEX website:
“The American Express Network lets you get the most out of your Card. From dining offers at some of the best restaurants in your area to travel offers, including hotel and airfare – not to mention some of the hottest entertainment, gift ideas and shopping savings around. ”

From doing a little more research about this, it seems like it is basically a cross between a daily deals program and a rewards program. From what I understand, businesses can sign up to offer discounts to AMEX cardholders, and the cardholders basically just need to Like the business on Facebook, come in, and charge whatever they buy with their AMEX cards.

The savings happen automatically and show up as statement credits on their bills. No coupons to print for consumers and no additional training for people at the businesses on how to process the coupons – just business as usual, but with savings.

Here’s the TechCrunch article where I first heard about this
Here’s the American Express Network Facebook Page where you can sign up

What do you do to save on food expenses?

Do you think you’d be able to cut your grocery budget?

What do you think of the AMEX Network idea?

When it comes to information about issues that affect your finances, there’s so much out there on the internet that it quickly becomes overwhelming for most people. What are you supposed to know when? What’s going on this week? What are the financial issues people are talking about and what are they saying?

This week, I’m going to experiment with something a little different here on the Finavigation Blog. I’m a huge personal finance nerd, and I’m constantly reading articles and blog posts about money and things that affect money. I’m going to take the best of what I’ve read this week (and hopefully in the coming weeks) and share it with you.

Most interesting things for this week:
The U.S. Debt Ceiling
The Start-Up of You
Netflix Price Increase Backlash

The U.S. Debt Ceiling

First up in topics this week is the ongoing debate over whether the U.S. debt ceiling should be increased and, if so, by how much.

CNN Money published an article that goes into a few ways the debt ceiling issue could affect your finances. Some of the ways they mention in the article include payments you may be expecting from the government, other cuts in government program spending, a rise in interest rates, re-tightening of the credit markets, potentially another recession, and it’s effects on the investment markets.

Read the CNN Money article – How the US debt ceiling could hit your finances

Investopedia also published a great article a couple weeks ago explaining very simply and concisely the debt ceiling issue, the different scenarios that could play out, and the repercussions of raising it vs. not raising it.

Read the Investopedia article – Should Congress Raise The Debt Ceiling?

The Start-Up of You

Thomas Freidman, bestselling author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World is Flat, and Hot, Flat and Crowded; wrote a very interesting opinion piece for the NY Times this week arguing that young people will increasingly need to “invent their next job” as opposed to going out and trying to find it.

Friedman says that with the economy where it is these days, a lot of employers are looking at less expensive options of getting things done as opposed to hiring domestically, such as automation, software, outsourcing, robotics, etc. If these jobs aren’t coming back, people are going to have to invent ways to add value to business processes above and beyond just performing tasks.

Check out Friedman’s article – The Start-Up of You

Netflix Price Increase Backlash

Earlier this week I, and just about every other Netflix subscriber, received an email from Netflix saying that the company was splitting their DVD by mail and streaming services into two separate plans starting September 1, 2011, where previously they had been bundled together.

The plans are priced individually, and together the total would be more than the bundle costs currently (33% more in my particular case). This angered many Netflix subscribers, and naturally they took to the internet to vent their frustrations. From a consumer perspective, I can definitely relate.

From a business perspective however, I can also relate to Netflix and why they are doing this. I came across a Tumblr post from Money Talk that sums up why Netflix would do this even knowing it would anger some of their subscribers.

Check out Yahoo Finance’s article – Why Netflix Raised Its Prices
Check out Money Talk’s Tumblr post – Why the Netflix Price Hike Doesn’t Really Matter (to Netflix)

What’s your opinion on the debt ceiling issue?

What have you done to re-invent your job?

How do you feel about the Netflix price increase?

Well, it finally happened. After almost 3 years of designing, developing, planning, and testing; Finavigation’s personal finance software has launched in beta. There were times I honestly thought the day would never come. There were times I doubted myself – that I would be able to pull something like this off and actually bring a product to market. There were times when I wondered if all the hard work I was doing was all for nothing. Today, I’m glad we’ve launched and I’m very much looking forward to helping people solve some of their financial issues with Finavigation.

While far from perfect (we’re constantly working to make it better), I think the software is useful enough right now to really help people get their finances in order, do the work that’s required to improve their situation, and build a solid financial foundation for themselves. Here’s a summary of what you can expect from the software and what it helps you do.

The software has four modules that we thought were of the utmost importance in managing your finances.

Financial Situation Analysis

You can’t get to where you want to be if you don’t know where you’re starting from. The Financial Situation Analysis module takes your inputs, organizes them into your own personal financial statements for you, analyzes them, and gives you some feedback about how you’re doing. If it finds anything that should be of concern, it lets you know. As your financial situation changes and you change your inputs into this module, the feedback the module gives you will change to fit your current situation. Some of the enhancements we will be making in the future will involve fine-tuning the calculations and algorithms within this module to provide better feedback on the financial situations of our users.

Debt Manager

This module is great for people who have multiple debts and are trying to figure out how they can get rid of them as quickly as possible. The Debt Manager takes your debts, runs them through a debt snowball-like algorithm that figures out what order of paying them down would take the least amount of time, and provides you with a strategy for getting out of debt. It tells you specifically which debt you should pay off first, how much you should pay toward that debt, and how long it will take you to pay that debt off if you pay the suggested amount. Then it does the same for each of your other debts.

Expense Manager

In the Expense Manager module, you can set a budget, enter your actual expenses either as they occur or after the fact, and compare both your month-to-date expenses and your year-to-date averages to your budget. The thing people usually find tricky about budgets is that expenses in some categories vary from month to month. The year-to-date view really helps with this because even though you may overspend in an expense category one month, it will let you quickly be able to tell if you’re consistently overspending or if it’s just this one month and you’re still on track from an annual perspective.

Cash Flow Manager

The Cash Flow Manager is an absolutely crucial tool for people living paycheck to paycheck. If you’ve never had to live paycheck to paycheck, it’s pretty worrisome. You’re always concerned that you’re going to run out of money. Sometimes you do, and then come all the overdraft fees. Because of this, you wait to schedule your bill payments until you actually have the money in your checking account, but sometimes you forget and you get charged with a late fee.

The Cash Flow Manager helps you manage all this better. It lets you enter in both income and expenses that will be coming up in the future, and it forecasts your checking account balance so you won’t have to guess whether you’ll have enough money or not. It also lets you schedule email reminders for each expense so that you never forget to pay a bill on time again.

We wanted to make it as easy for people to use as possible, so we’ve set up a 30-day free trial so that you can use it enough to really get the hang of it. We also wanted to show that we really believe in our software and that we’re committed and passionate about helping people improve their finances, so we’ve added a 6 month money-back guarantee.

OK, enough with the reading.
Go check out our newly-launched software!

If you have any feedback on how we can make it better, we’d love to hear it. Just send an email to admin@finavigation.com.

If you take a look around these days, there seems to be a tendency toward making people do less work for everything. People like this. Why wouldn’t they? It’s easier to do less than to do more.

For some things, less work is definitely better. We have search engines that make finding what we’re looking for easier, social media that makes meeting new people and staying on top of what’s going on with all our friends easier, among countless other examples of wonderful ways to do what you need done with less work.

For certain things, however, doing what’s easy ends up doing more harm than good in the long run. Certain things you simply have to be there for. There’s value in showing up and doing the work. It makes you understand what you’re doing on a level that you just can’t if you’re not putting forth the effort. I think personal finance is one of those things.

Take managing expenses for example. A lot of people just go out and spend money, and as long as there’s a positive balance in their checking account, they’re fine. That’s easy. That’s doing the minimum amount of work necessary to get by. If I did this though, should I really ever expect to be able to get ahead financially? I might if I made way more money than I could ever spend, but I don’t, and I think most people don’t either.

If I’m not tracking my spending, creating a budget, comparing it to what I actually spent to see where I’m overspending, and making adjustments accordingly then I’m not really paying attention to my spending. I’d be doing the minimum instead of putting forth the effort necessary to properly plan how I’m going to ensure I spend less than I make.

The point I’m trying to drive home here is that when you need to do work, something that makes you do less work is not what you need. You need the right tools for the job you’re trying to do. Getting ahead financially takes knowledge about what’s going on with your finances. It takes awareness and planning. It takes time and effort.

All these things are essential to formulating a strategy for achieving your financial goals and accumulating wealth. The problem is that doing this takes more effort than a lot of people are willing to put forth, but it just can’t be like that if you really want to make things better.

I’m designing Finavigation’s personal finance software to help people do the work that’s necessary to build a solid financial foundation for themselves. We’re now a couple weeks away from launching, and I’m really excited to be able to bring into the world a solution that will really help people improve their finances.

Don’t miss out on your chance to give it a try. You owe it to your finances.

Sign up here to give the software a try and get on the road to improving your finances.

Are you willing to put in the effort?
What are you currently doing to make sure your finances are in order?

This is the third and final post about the lessons I learned from the book Do the Work by Steven Pressfield that helped me to have the most productive few weeks of my life. In case you missed them, in my last two posts I wrote about fighting a force called resistance that is constantly trying to hold us back and about acting and then reflecting later to see if what you did was right as opposed to over-analyzing what you need to do before doing it. The third lesson I learned, however, is the one I’m having the most trouble implementing.

Getting Out There
There seems to be this programmed psychological bias most of us have toward not doing things that make us feel uncomfortable. One of the things that makes us uncomfortable is sending something we’ve created out into the world. It could be a book you’ve written, a painting you’ve painted, a song you’ve composed, a movie or video you’ve shot, or a product you’ve developed. In each case, you’re putting a piece of you – something that is a representation of you and your creativity – out there for everyone to see. And it’s absolutely frightening.

The book addresses this fear of having to put a part of you out there that others can judge. It acknowledges that shipping is something that is extremely difficult, but says that once you do it, it is extremely empowering and will teach you that you can do it again and again.

This one really hit home for me. As someone who is pretty competitive, fighting resistance was just an easy change in attitude. Acting and reflecting was less work than doing a lot of research on stuff before making a decision, so that one was easy for me also. But as we put the finishing touches on our first version of our personal finance software, I’m definitely feeling the uncomfortableness and fear that comes with launching a new product. I’ve spent the last couple years thinking about, designing, and developing the software. It’s the first thing I will have ever put out that evolved out of my creativity and my passion for helping people improve their personal finances.

I think this is something that is just going to take sheer determination and self awareness to keep myself convinced that even though we’ll always be working to make the software better, that having an unfinished product that is helping people is better than a slightly better product that isn’t. I have to remember what I’m doing this for.

How do you get over the fear of putting something you’ve created out there?

In my last post, I wrote about how the first lesson I took away from the book Do the Work by Steven Pressfield had helped me have the most productive couple weeks of my life. The productivity continues, and in this post, I’ll go over another lesson I learned from the book that helped contribute to my recent spurt of productivity.

Act and Reflect

In addition to fighting Resistance, the book introduces a very simple concept called Act and Reflect. In essence, it’s exactly what it sounds like. When it comes to something we have to do or a decision we need to make, a lot of us obsess over being as informed as possible so that we can take the best course of action or make the most-informed decision possible. Our intentions are in the right place, but doing this for everything leads to putting off the actual actions or decisions that need to be made.

Instead of doing a bunch of research and taking every little thing into consideration, the book got me to consider just doing it and then reflecting back to see if it was worth doing or if I made the right decision.

I’ve also heard Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, talk about this being a critical skill for entrepreneurship because as an entrepreneur wearing multiple hats, you just don’t have the time to do all the research that would be necessary. I think it can be applicable to just about anyone who is trying to be more productive. When you put something on your to-do list, don’t overthink it. Just do it.

Obviously, this wouldn’t work for every action or decision. There are very important things in life for which you need to be as informed as possible before acting or deciding. The great thing about it is that if you take this approach for all the other little things you have to do, you should have extra time available to be able to do the research for these important things.

I’ve personally used this concept in conjunction with the Fighting Resistance concept, which I wrote about last post, to knock dozens of tasks off my to-do list these last few weeks. I’ve woken up every day ready to take on the world because I know that it will be there for me to take on and then I look at the things on my list and get to working on them.

How do you think you can benefit from this approach?
What else do you do to increase productivity?

I have a philosophy around which I’m building Finavigation’s personal finance software that in order to make something better, you need to put in the effort and do the work required to improve. At the same time, trying to build a business can be extremely challenging at times, as some of you know. There are times when things seem to come easy and there are times when it seems like you need to move the entire world to make even an inch of forward progress.

I was feeling like the latter a few weeks ago, when I happened to come across a book that helped motivate me to have what has probably been the most productive 2 weeks of my life so far.

The book was Do the Work by Steven Pressfield and I came across it as I was reading Seth Godin’s blog. I found it a quick but very worthwhile read, and I wanted to both recommend it (the Kindle edition is currently free) and write about a few of the things I took away from this book. Below is the first of these.

Resistance, the Enemy

One of the main takeaways from the book for me was the suggestion of recognizing a force that lives inside all of us called Resistance. Basically, Resistance is what ultimately makes you not do something that you know you’re supposed to be doing. It can take the form of procrastination, laziness, discouragement, or a variety of other emotions. According to the book, these are all different forms of Resistance.

The book also stresses that Resistance is inside of you, but it is NOT you. You can think of it as an evil force inside of you that wants to sabotage your forward progress and wants to keep you from doing things that are beneficial for you. Resistance is always inside of you and your job is to go to battle with it every single day.

I don’t know about you but when I view Resistance in this way, it’s like putting a face on the enemy… and the face isn’t mine. Before I read this book, I felt like when I felt discouraged, that it was me feeling discouraged and that I was fighting a battle with myself to get motivated. From a psychological standpoint, battling yourself somehow seems harder than battling a made-up enemy that lives inside of you.

I found this very simple, but also very powerful as a motivator. This was the part of the book that really got me motivated because it got me expecting to encounter Resistance every day and knowing that if I’m expecting it, I can be prepared to win the fight day after day.

Do you think it’s useful to view Resistance in this way?
What are some other ways you get motivated?

Stay tuned. I’ll write about other things I learned from this book soon!

In case you missed it, the first lesson was that you need to hustle to perform well. I certainly had to do that working the broiler during rush hour, and I’m willing to bet some of you have also had similar experiences having to work quickly and make split-second decisions under pressure in order to perform well. But that wasn’t all I learned. Here are a few other lessons.

Second Lesson: Learn how to do multiple things to increase your value to the company

Just because they started me off working the broiler doesn’t mean that was all I did. Being an ambitious little guy, I quickly learned how to perform other tasks such as working the fries, making sandwiches, working the back window (a.k.a. the guy who takes your money and tells you to drive up to the second window), cleaning, and prepping the food. It was important for me to show my manager that I was capable of more than what they initially hired me for.

The true lesson I learned here is that when you show the ability to learn how to do multiple things, it conveys the fact that you are resourceful and thus increases your value to the company. In my case, knowing how to do all these things ended up in me being asked to help my manager open the restaurant every Sunday morning. This meant having to wake up early and be there at 6:30am, but I didn’t mind too much because I knew that it meant I was doing a good job and they thought I was capable of taking on additional responsibility. It also didn’t hurt that they gave me a pretty decent raise.

When I was opening the restaurant, and also during slow times, I had to do even more things that weren’t necessarily part of my job description. Some of these things I actually enjoyed doing, but others I absolutely hated… which leads me to the third lesson I learned.

Third Lesson: Get the things you don’t like to do out of the way so that you can excel at the things you do like

There were a couple of things I had to do there that I absolutely hated. The most hated of these was prepping the pickles. The pickles come pre-sliced in a huge tub (probably about 5 gallons) filled with pickle juice. I’d have to crack the tub open and, with sanitized hands, reach in there and pull out handful after handful of pickles and dump them into a bin. Personally, I thought the pickles were disgusting and the fact that I was sticking my bare hand into a huge tub of them covered in pickle juice absolutely repulsed me. However, I did this anyway about 3 times a week simply because it had to be done.

As a side note, the one thing I loved doing most was breaking down (flattening) the cardboard boxes that the food came in so that they could fit most economically into the recycling bin. I’m not going to lie, I had a blast beating the crap out of those cardboard boxes and then stomping them flat. It was absolutely silly… but I digress. Back to the lesson.