More than anywhere else on earth, women in business are taking the reigns and changing the trajectory of their lives. Increasingly we’re making more of our own financial choices and earning more money. There are still a few glass ceilings, but many of us are breaking through by installing ourselves as CEOs of our own companies.
We are, in fact, the CEOs of our own lives, all of us, but very few of us really act that way when it comes to making long term plans for our money.
I speak across the country to groups of women who want to know more about money. It’s rare, however, to meet women who are financially confident and self-assured.
I think this is because most women in business I meet have a generally optimistic outlook—that everything is going to work out, financially and otherwise.
After all, they’ve risked to start a business, to forgo personal earnings until the business is well established, to take on payroll and insurance, client needs and payment plans.
Decisions are required at every turn and there are hundreds of emails waiting from vendors who are all hell-bent on selling the tool they earn commission on that will make her business soar. There is no clear methodology for making these decisions—they are often knee jerk responses to whatever feels the most urgent in the moment.
There is an attitude of optimism tinged with doubt and sometimes fear that accompanies the forced (and sometimes fake) over-confidence of the female entrepreneur but there is rarely a clear financial plan, written down, with automatic payments set up to fund it for HOW it is all going to work out.
So, the big lie is this: Our hope for the future is as good as a Plan for the future.
We go along, doing our best, making choices about today using all of the information we’ve gathered from the past. The future seems like an unknown, and because of the hectic in our schedule, it also seems that it’s too far away to think about. This Wall Street Journal article tells us that we have to use a different part of our brain to think about the future.
And, we have to get really real. We have to itemize and take inventory, just like the big box stores, and really take on what it costs to live the life we have, the life we love, and the life we need.
There are choices, always, about what we earn and what we do with it. Those choices are ours to make. Too many entrepreneurial women fail to plan for their financial future, opting instead to spend what they earn on growing their business and hope that things will just work out somehow for their personal wealth.
Maybe the idea of waiting for a prince is really secretly coded into the female DNA. But I’ve checked the research; scientists have yet to locate the “Someday My Prince Will Come” gene.
As an entrepreneur, it’s tempting to forget about saving money now, and just hope for a multi-million dollar exit, which is, in its way, a newer version of the Cinderella story. You might imagine how to build the company so big it gets to IPO or make it so attractive that another firm offers to buy it for millions.
Statistically speaking, though, these dreams are as dreamy as that handsome prince that kisses us awake and whisks us away to the happy ending part of the fairytale.
Hope in and of itself, is a recipe for failure.
Leave hopefulness and optimism for the areas of life where it is appropriate, and in the area of your finances, plan to succeed. And then work the plan!
Women often fall into one of two camps when it comes to our finances — we either suffer from a cognitive bias called over-confidence, or we suffer from a fog of confusion that leaves us waiting to take action.
- The Over Confidence Cam
Women bold enough to strike out on their own in business might also fake the confidence enough to actively trade their own investment portfolios, but study after study shows that going it alone in the market is a very costly mistake.
One study showed that the actual average returns produced by do-it-yourself investors are a full 6% per year less than a simple buy-and-hold plan for stock market investments.
- The Confusion Camp
For those of us who might feel timid or confused about investing, first normalize the fear—it’s what most of us feel when learning about something new.
Also understand that the nature of compound returns means that money left sitting in cash loses value every day.
You don’t need to know how to pilot the plane to fly in it — commit now to making the effort to move through discomfort and find an advisor to work with you to make a plan that works for you.
Remember you are the CEO of your Personal Financial Future Corporation, and every CEO needs a good CFO.
A good saving and investing plan will scale, and it’s part of learning how to earn and preserve wealth.
Our proprietary technology teaches you how to PLAN by laying the groundwork for
- Paying off debt
- Laying away earnings
(for taxes and other big ticket aspirations) - Activating your mindset of
affluence and - Noticing a new freedom to Spend
When you work with us, you learn how to invest capital wisely with every single business decision and how to eliminate worry about
debt and not being able to reach financial independence. You grow the kind of financial confidence you can’t fake and the empowerment that comes from knowing that you are the shero of your own, authentic, life.
Whether it’s with my firm or someone else, it’s essential to Get plugged in to a successful financial plan powered by a diversified investment strategy now, so if and when your business income increases dramatically, you know how to channel those earnings into growing your personal wealth and making your own financial dreams come true (with or without the prince).