277 | Rewind: Change Is Required

I’ve had a few conversations recently with people who want to keep doing the same things and magically have more savings and no debt.

The thing is, if you want to change your finances, something has to change.

You can’t change staying the same.

In this rewind episode, let’s talk about the requirement for change, including examples of two attorneys who are not making the changes they want to make in their finances and an example of a third attorney who did.

• • one lawyer’s experience with wanting to create different results with her finances
  • what people want the answer to be when they want to change
  • the way to create change in your finances
  • another lawyer’s experience with wanting to change her finances
  • the discomfort of change vs. the discomfort of staying the same
  • a third lawyer’s experience with changing her finances
  • deciding whether the change is worth it to you

You’re listening to Personal Finance for Lawyers. 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.

Today, I’m bringing you a rewind episode. I have had a number of conversations recently with people where the underlying sense, or sentiment, suggestion is that they want to keep doing exactly the same thing—keep living exactly how they’re living, spending exactly how they’re spending—but magically have more money in savings or no debt or whatever their financial goal is, and it doesn’t work like that.

And so I thought about this episode that first aired about two years ago now, but it’s all about the fact that if you want change, something has to change.

So if you’re like the people that I’ve been talking to recently, and you want to have better finances, but you want everything to be exactly the same, you don’t want to make any changes, this episode is for you. So please enjoy this rewind episode: “Change Is Required.”

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So today we are talking about how to create change in your finances. I was speaking with a lawyer recently about her finances and the issues that she’s having, and as we were going through talking about what was going on with her finances, she said something to the effect of, “I just don’t know what else I can do short of cutting my expenses or making more money like I just don’t know what to do.”

And I told her like, “Yeah, that’s the answer. That’s what you can do. Those are the things. That’s the way that you do it.”

And I had the idea to do this episode because I know she’s not alone. So many times people want to change, but they don’t want to change to get the change. People want a change, but they don’t want to change to get the change. They want the new result, but they want to keep doing the same things and magically get that new result, and it just doesn’t work that way.

I was listening to an interview recently, where the person being interviewed said something like, “People say they want the truth, but they don’t actually want the truth because they want the truth to be a magic pill or a wave of a magic wand, and everything changes, but it just doesn’t work that way.”

And I think that’s so true. This lawyer’s statement about “I don’t know what to do short of cutting expenses or making more money”—that statement is the perfect example of what this interviewee was saying.

She knows what to do. She knows exactly what she needs to do to achieve her goals. You know what you need to do to achieve your goals.

The problem isn’t knowing what to do. It’s executing what you already know to do. It’s not wishing that the answer was something different.

When you’re thinking about your finances, if you’re not already achieving your goals, so you’re not making progress on paying off your debt or saving or whatever it is for you, you can’t change your finances continuing to do what you’re doing now.

You can’t change your finances, having the exact same expenses that you have now and making the exact same amount that you make now. It doesn’t work that way. Something has to change.

So you have to create a gap between your income and expenses so that you have money to use for your goals. And the way that you do that is either you decrease your expenses, you increase your income, or both. That’s it. Those are the options.

Either you spend less or you make more, and one way or another you have to create that space between how much you make and how much you spend because that’s the money that you’re going to use to achieve your goals. But something has to change if you want to see change in your finances. You can’t keep doing the same thing expecting different results.

I spoke with another lawyer recently who was telling me that she’s nervous to start working on her finances because she knows that it will feel uncomfortable to make that change. So sometimes, you know what you want to do like the first lawyer I was talking about, but you’re afraid to do it because you don’t want to feel uncomfortable.

So this lawyer was saying that she knows it’ll feel uncomfortable to do something different. And it feels comfortable doing what she’s doing now.

And a lot of lawyers tell me some version of that, that you’re afraid to work on your finances because you’re afraid of what you’ll have to do to change, and you’re afraid of how that will feel.

But when we dig into it, doing what you’re doing now doesn’t actually feel comfortable. This person was telling me that she feels stressed in her current situation. So basically, she’s telling me that she’s comfortable feeling stressed. But no, you’re not comfortable feeling stressed. You’re used to it. That’s your norm. Right? But that doesn’t mean that you’re comfortable.

And so if you’re like this person or any of the other lawyers that I’ve talked to who’ve said something like this, the thing you have to ask yourself is whether you’d rather continue to feel the way you feel right now, if you’d rather continue to feel whatever you’re feeling about your finances currently, or if you’d rather feel a little discomfort in the short term as you make changes.

But ultimately, you’re going to feel better so it’s going to be a short term discomfort for a long term relief, right? You’re going to feel uncomfortable either way. So you may as well feel the discomfort that leads to the results you want.

One of my clients and I had this conversation before we started working together, too, and she ultimately decided that it was worth it to her to make the changes. And she went on to pay off over $12,000 of debt just in the time that we were working together. She’ll go on to pay off everything, all the debt that she has, and save and invest and all the things.

That one decision is going to end up being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars in her lifetime. Do you think she wishes she had stayed comfortable? Because she was nervous about what making change would feel like? No.

When you want to change your finances, something has to change. You can’t stay the same, continuing to do the same things, thinking the same things, approaching your finances in the same way, and expect to see change. It just does not work that way.

So when you’re thinking about changing your finances, when you’re thinking about paying off debt, saving, investing, building wealth, you have to decide that the change that will be required to achieve those things is worth it to you.

Would you rather make that change and move toward the things that you’re saying you want for your finances? Or would you rather stay the same and stay in the same place? You have to choose one. It can’t be both.

If the change is worth it to you, and you want some help making the necessary changes to achieve your financial dreams, let’s work together. Head to rhothomas.com/call to get started.

But either way whether you reach out to me or not, you cannot change staying the same.

All right, so that is it for this week’s episode. Come connect with me over on social media. You can find me on LinkedIn, Rho Thomas, and Instagram @iamrhothomas.

Subscribe to the show and leave a review, both of which help more people to find it. It helps the show to reach more people. And please think of a friend or two who could use this information and share the episode 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’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve.

Talk to you later.