147 | The Philosophy of Financial Success

The way you think about money is vital to your success with it.

I teach my clients to think about their money differently, which helps them to approach it in a way that allows them to achieve their money goals and feel better about money overall.

In this episode, let’s talk about 8 of my top beliefs around managing money and why they’re so important.

• 8 beliefs about money and managing it
• why the beliefs are important and how they impact your finances

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If you’re ready to learn the mindset and strategies to master your money, let’s schedule a call.

You’re listening to Wealthyesque. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. Today we are talking about the philosophy for financial success, my philosophy for financial success. So to me your philosophy is just the collection of thoughts and beliefs that you have about a particular area. And so I want to share with you the way that I think about money and the things that I teach my clients when they are learning to manage their money better. So I’ve got eight things here, and I will just go through each of them. The first one is true wealth is having control of your time, but you can’t achieve true wealth when your finances are a mess. I have said many times before that I believe that true wealth is having control of your time because you can be making a lot of money but feel stuck right feel like you don’t have control of your time or like someone else is directing everything that you do. You don’t have a lot of autonomy so you don’t feel very wealthy. You don’t have to make a lot of money to have wealth in this sense. I’ve told this story before about how one of the stories that really inspired me, when my husband and I were just starting out was about a couple they were both teachers or at least one of them was a teacher, and they were living on teacher salaries. And they had this plan to pay off their house because one of them wanted to stay home once they had kids. And I was so inspired by that because I was making more than a teacher’s salary. I used to work in big law and I just didn’t have the kind of flexibility that they were talking about in my life. Big part of how my husband and I started our financial journey was me wanting to take advantage of this part time policy at the firm I was working at when we had our first child, but when we looked at our finances, we didn’t have the space to people take a cut like that. And so we decided to get our finances in order and the driving factor behind that was having control of our time. So that’s when I really started thinking about the concept of true wealth. Being about having control of your time and not so much the money. Yes, having money helps, but it is not everything. Alright, number two is managing your money IS simple. So many lawyers believe that money is complicated and I tell people all the time if you can practice law, you can manage your money because it really is just spending less than you make and using the difference to achieve your financial goals. Typically when people come to me they have some sort of goal like paying off debt or saving or investing or some combination and they think that money is really complicated and they feel intimidated by it. And so often they’re just avoiding it. But really, all you have to do is spend less than what you’re making, and then use that difference that money that you’re not spending toward whatever your goal is. It truly is not more complicated than that. But we make it more complicated because of all the things that we have internalized about money and our fear about money and all of that, but it truly is simple. Number three, you are the boss of your finances. I know that you probably just want me to tell you what to do. Just tell you what rules to follow and all of that and I’ll say I’ve been in the same boat. I have felt the same way. I would love for somebody to just lay out a list step by step of things to do. But that’s just not the case. Like there are no one size fits all rules. There are some general concepts that work for everybody. But you are the boss. Nobody can tell you what you can or can’t do with your money. So something that works for me with my finances or maybe the I don’t spend on you might spend on and that doesn’t mean that you are wrong or that I’m wrong. You get to decide what you’re going to do with your money. And so you just want to determine what’s important to you. And then you’re able to direct your money toward those goals that you have for yourself. Number four, budgeting creates freedom, not restriction. So many people think about budgets in this concept of deprivation and I can’t do this because I’m on a budget. I can’t do that because I’m on a budget. But really your budget is just you intentionally deciding what you’re going to do with your money where you’re going to direct it how you’re going to spend it like we talked about in number three, right? You get to decide what you want to do with your money. Your budget is that intentional decision, the plan that you’ve made for how you’re going to use your money. And when you create that plan. When you decide I’m going to use this money for this thing, that money for that thing. It gives you the freedom to spend on those categories that you’ve decided you’re going to spend on because you already know that the money is there. I think so often people have the experience of wanting to spend on something or even spending on something by in the back of your mind feeling like oh, maybe I shouldn’t be spending this. I don’t know if I can afford to do this. When you have a budget and you’ve decided how much you’re going to spend on particular things in particular categories. Then, you know, off top Yes, I have the money to do this. I know that I can spend on this thing and it’s not going to negatively impact the rest of my finances. Number five debt is not bad. We get a lot of messages about how bad debt is and how you’re stupid to pay interest and all of these negative things about debt but really none of it is true. That is not good. That is not bad. It just is what it is. And we get to decide how we’re going to think about it. I use the example often about student loan debt and how the average student loan debt for lawyers, this is anecdotal. I don’t have actual statistics on this, but it’s somewhere in the like 150,000 to $200,000 range based off of what I’m seeing and a lot of people feel like that is just so much debt, and it’s so overwhelming and all of that. But I told about my story where my husband and I had almost half a million of student loan debt. So when we got down to 150 200,000, we were like, Yes, this is great, right? We had these positive thoughts about that amount of debt. And so that’s how we know that the amount itself the debt itself, is not good or bad because one person might think that that’s a really good thing another person might not. We get to decide how we’re going to think about our debt. It does not have to be bad. I talked recently about how debt allows many people to afford things like college like law school, like your house, things like that, that you’re not able to pay for upfront in many cases. We don’t have to feel bad about having debt we can acknowledge that it’s there. We can make our plan for how we’re going to take care of it. And then we can move forward without all of the beating ourselves up and feeling bad about debt because we’ve internalized this belief that it’s bad. Number six, you don’t get from zero to Beyonce overnight. Everybody wants to go from where they are now to having these perfectly managed finances and having all this money in the bank and no debt. But you didn’t get to the point that you’re at now overnight. You’re not going to get out of it overnight. You need to take the small steps that lead to the ultimate goal that you have. Don’t ignore the small steps or not even take the small steps because you think they’re too small because those small steps are going to lead to that ultimate thing that you want for your finances. Beyonce has been in the game for like 30 something years, right? She’s been performing for a long time. She wasn’t always Beyonce. It has built up to this point. When we’re looking at our finances, when you’re looking at the things that you’re trying to do with your finances, you’re gonna have a lot of time where you’re doing things that don’t feel like they’re moving the needle a whole lot, but they’re still getting you to the ultimate goal that you have and then you get there and you’re like, Wow, here I am. Every win is worth celebrating when you’re on your financial journey. Even those wins that you feel are too small to even acknowledge as wins as one of the biggest things that I do with my client is helping them to see these amazing things that they do that they just completely ignore. As like these are big things. This is a win this is good. Celebrate all of the progress that you make, even if you don’t think it’s a lot of progress because it’s still progress and it’s still getting you to where you want to be. Alright, number seven, there is no shame in getting support. We tend to think as lawyers as these highly educated people as the one who made it, quote unquote, in our friend group in our family, we tend to think that we have to be these like superheroes and we can never show that we don’t know how to do something and we just have to figure it out and struggle through and whatever else. But there is no reason that you have to do that. You can’t always do it alone and that in all contexts, but especially when you’re talking about your personal finances, if it’s something that you have struggled with for a long time and you haven’t been able to get control of it and make the progress that you want to make then reach out for help. You’re not more noble if you suffer through and struggle through and do it by yourself and nobody is looking at you negatively for asking for help. All right, and number eight, the last one is the best most effective money strategy starts with the way that you think your money mindset, how you’re thinking about yourself and your money because I can give you all the resources there are so many resources available. So many books, so many blogs, so many podcasts, all of that. And if you have not taken action on the information that is available to you, it always comes down to your mindset and the way that you’re thinking so until you get your mind right you’re not going to take that action. Ultimately, you want to set yourself up to actually follow through on the things that you want to do. And that starts with looking at your mindset questioning the things that you just always believed about money and about yourself and about your ability to manage it because often we tell ourselves these stories that aren’t even true, but we go through operating in our lives under these assumptions, the stories that we’ve made up so yes, you want the strategy, you want to know the things to do with your money that is important. But the more important piece of it is always going to be the mindset piece. It’s always going to be how you’re thinking about things because that is going to have a bigger bearing on whether you’re able to achieve your goals than any strategy will. There are so many strategies that work so many different ways to accomplish the same thing but if your mindset isn’t together, you’re not going to stick with any one of them consistently enough long enough to actually achieve the results that you want. So that is some of my philosophy about money and financial success. These are the things that I teach my clients as well and it’s why they are paying off debt and saving money and achieving their goals and just overall feeling better, more confident, more relaxed with their money. I know how important the way that you think about money is and so that’s why I help my clients to change those thoughts on top of helping them implement strategies that get them to the results that they want. So I will help you as well. You can head to rho thomas.com/call to schedule your consultation. And let’s get started changing your mindset so that you can achieve the things that you want with your finances as well. All right, that is it for this week’s episode. Come connect with me over on social media. You can find me most often on LinkedIn rho Thomas and Instagram, I am rho Thomas, subscribe to the show and leave a review both of which helped more people to find it. And please think of a friend or two who could use this information and share it with them. As we close out friend I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you as you do that consistently week. After week. You continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live a life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.