Achieving the Right Balance in Your Long-Term Financial Plan
Throw on your lulu Align leggings, ladies, because today, we’re talking about #balance.
As much as I’m an advocate for balance in the woo-woo sense (start each day meditating to the sounds of birds chirping and journal about your innermost thoughts about whether Euphoria’s episode 6 spoilers were accurate; you know the drill), I think a more practical area to focus your efforts toward balance is in the realm of the different areas of investment you have in your life.
Namely, your money, your time, your relationships, and your work.
These different areas of investment are clearly interrelated, but it’s wild how out-of-balance they can become when we’re not being intentional about where we’re investing our finite energy resources.
And because this is a brand about money (and not about time, relationships, or work, directly), it’s easy for me to focus really intently on the financial investments you’re making (and believe me, they’re important!).
But ultimately, it’s a brand about money because of what I believe to be true about money: That when you have your financial house in order, it can change the trajectory of your life, open new doors, and result in more life satisfaction and happiness for you.
That’s the thing, though: The money itself is not the end goal. As Ray Dalio says in his new book, Principles for Dealing with a Changing World Order, “money” has no inherent value. Wealth, on the other hand, is what we use to get the things we want. It’s purchasing power. Can you afford to take a year off? To travel the world?
In 2022, it feels like the more realistic questions to which ‘wealth’ determines the answers are: Can you afford to buy a place to live? To put food on the table? To have a kid?
The money isn’t the end goal, but it’s a necessary means for building wealth broadly and achieving the things we want.
Where “time, relationships, and work” come into play
We all assign different values to these things, usually for reasons that are weirdly interdependent. For example, the more I worked my little fingers to the bone clicking and clacking away on three different laptops every day, the more I valued my free time.
Because the dial on one area of investment got turned up, it meant the other dial became even more valuable to me. And because we don’t have an infinite amount of energy (despite what the #girlbosses online will assure you about having the same hours in the day as Beyoncé or some shit), energy that’s invested in one area (work) is energy that can’t be invested somewhere else (e.g., relationships).
This is where some DIY financial planning can actually sync really nicely with allocating your precious resources accordingly: If you know how much money you need to live the life you want to, you can effectively cut off the spigot of energy for that resource and focus elsewhere once you know you’re set up correctly.
Unfortunately for me, for about 18 months, my “money dial” got turned way up – and stuck there. I was preoccupied with work and earning at the expense of free time and my relationships, and they suffered (not irrevocably so, but it wasn’t exactly a balanced time – and my mental health took a minute to bounce back from the burnout of obsessing over work and money).
Now, that’s not to suggest that you need to allocate equal resources toward all four of these things. For some people, work is where they derive fulfillment. If that’s the case, you may be perfectly happy with dumping a few extra energy units into that area of investment. But if you hate your job and your favorite thing in the world is to spend time with your friends? As long as your financial future is on track, there’s really no reason to invest extra energy in that area (and also, you may want to explore getting a new job).
Determining how much these four investment areas matter to you
I’m trying to physically restrain myself from typing this sentence, but at the risk of sounding like a Tim Ferriss mouthpiece… it’s a little bit like lifestyle design.
A balanced schedule that allows you to get the most bang for your energy-bucks doesn’t happen on accident. It’s something you have to think about and design for yourself, and – here’s the good news for that homework assignment – if you focus on structuring your energy inputs correctly, the outputs will almost definitely net the result you want.
(You know what they say: Trash inputs = trash outcomes. Does anyone say that? We’re saying it now.)
The interconnectedness of your investment buckets – time, relationships, work, money – makes dialing things up and down a little bit like playing 3D chess with Elon Musk, because each move you make has downstream consequences.
Spend too much time on boho chic vacations in Tulum with your friends and your “relationships” cup will runneth over, but your “money” bucket will spring a leak.
Spend too much time on HBOMax and your “time” cup (the one that, in my mind, signifies free/me time) will be plentiful, but your “work” dial might start to slip.
And to make matters even more fun and complex, the importance of these areas may change over time for you. Just because one thing is a focus this year doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll continue to be a focus. They’re adjustable, like those breakaway pants from the early 2000s that I made my dad buy for me off some boys’ basketball coach on eBay so I could change for gym class with a little extra flair.
The good news? We can start with the area that does have some mathematical basis and work backward from there: Money.
Using a DIY financial plan to guide your other ‘investment’ decisions
There are a few basic tools in our toolkit that can help us figure out where we’re headed, financially. I love the Financial Independence Planner (shameless plug) because it takes a few key inputs (your current invested assets, current income, expected raises, and current spending) and maps out a hypothetical, conservative future.
It says, “Hey, if you continue on this path that you’re currently on, this is where you’re probably going to end up – and when.”
(Sure, it’s built in such a way to handle the sophisticated elements of projecting outcomes for you, but it’s not super challenging to piece those things together for yourself.)
For example, I remember plugging in my numbers about a year ago and realizing – to my utter shock – that based on my current path at the time, I was projected to be financially independent around age 30.
Once I was done popping bottles and screaming, I realized something: “Wait, if my current path is going to produce this outcome, then… can’t I just stay the course and let it happen?” At the time, I was scheming ways to trade even more of my money for time when I realized: I don’t have to do that.
In fact, it ended up inducing the opposite reaction: “Hey, I don’t really need to retire when I’m 30. I’m cool with reaching financial independence at 35. Let me figure out how I can work a little less and spend a little more…”
Regardless, using your financial independence timeline as the framework (i.e., are you comfortable with the path you’re on? What path are you on?) can help contextualize which areas of your life you’re ignoring.
If you’re even slightly self-reflective, you likely already know what it’s going to tell you: You’re either way too focused on money (at the expense of all else) or desperately need to focus on it more.
If you’re sitting here like, “Yeah, I think I’m the latter…” Remember: Focusing on it more doesn’t mean you need to become a daytrader and set up a six-monitor mini stock exchange in your walk-in closet. Fortunately for you, we live in 2022: A year in which investing has literally never been easier with a lower barrier to entry.
Roboadvisors make it painless to invest—to the point that you can answer a few questions about yourself, deposit cash, and let their algorithm take it away. Your responsibility for “focusing on money” goes from “learning everything there is to know about investing” to “save enough money to dump it into these accounts every month.”
And that knowledge—that it needs to be more of a focus—serves as a starting point.
Now that you know how your “money” investment bucket needs to change…
You can start to plug the other pieces into place.
The one that comes next, logically, is work.
Whether you concluded that you either need to earn more or cool down a little, you may shift your attitude toward work accordingly. Work, then, impacts free time: And your “time” bucket will shift to accommodate the changes (by either giving you more free time or less).
What you do with that remaining free time is up to you, but it stands to reason that if your relationships are important to you at all, you likely want to spend some energy on pouring into them.
The “money” bucket – the one that answers the very important question, “What path am I on right now?” – allows us to see our priorities more clearly.
After all, we may think we know what we care about: But show me your schedule and your credit card statement, and I’ll tell you what you really care about. After that, it comes down to accountability.
Maybe that accountability takes the form of finding ways to earn more. Maybe it’s finding ways to spend more time with friends and less time working. Maybe it’s something else entirely.
The bottom line
To quote myself from 10 minutes ago, a schedule full of inputs that net the outcomes you want doesn’t happen on accident – and while it might be hard to believe that someone who writes a blog about money would insist that maybe money isn’t the most important thing in your life, knowing when to throttle the supply of power you’re feeding each investment “bucket” with can help make sure things don’t get too out of balance.
And hey, maybe you’ll find that you’re super off-track and you’re spending way too much energy on relationships and ‘me’ time right now – that’s a path that ultimately leads to destruction, too, as it means you won’t have the financial prospects (either in the form of literal money in the bank or work opportunities) to sustain yourself long-term. Money might be the thing you need to focus more on.
Asking these questions and performing an honest assessment of how you’re expending your precious energetic resources can prevent burnout and ruin before they happen – and create a lot more balance and joy in the process.
