269 | Stop Waiting for the Right Time

Are you waiting for the right time to take control of your finances?

It’s a common mistake that costs a lot of lawyers a lot of money.

In this episode, let’s talk about why waiting for the right time can be so costly and why the right time is when you decide it is.

• • why waiting for the “right time” is a mistake
  • a real life situation of a potential client who waited for the right time and ended up in a worse situation
  • wisdom from my granny, Zig Ziglar, and Ogden Nash on waiting for the right time
  • an example of how waiting costs more in the long run
  • how to get started when you decide that the time is right

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.

Today we are talking about waiting for the “right time.”

This is something that comes up a lot with respect to personal finance and other areas of life as well, and it is a trap. It’s a mistake, and I don’t want you to fall into this trap to end up getting caught up, and so we’re going to talk about it today to hopefully help you overcome this thought about waiting for the right time to do the things that you want to do.

So I have heard people say all kinds of things like I’m going to start planning my spending next month. I’m going to start saving as soon as I make more money, I’m going to get on top of my finances in the new year. All of these things that we put off for this mythical right time.

I’ve even talked with potential clients who…they decide not to get started with working on their finances because they think it’s not the right time. But the thing is the right time is not just going to happen to you. It’s not this magical thing that just all of a sudden appears. The stars align, and now it’s the right time to do the thing.

This is a common misconception. We’re waiting until things calm down at work. We’re waiting until we make more. We’re waiting until we have fewer obligations. We’re waiting for all of these things to fall into place to let us know that it’s the right time.

And again, I’m not just talking about with respect to money. I think we do this in a lot of areas, but I see it with money.

One situation really stands out in my mind – it’s a woman that I was speaking with and she was dealing with a lot of debt. She’s a single mom and she was feeling just really stressed about her finances. And we talked about it. She decided that it wasn’t the right time. She didn’t want to move forward and went about her way.

Well, then she comes back maybe a year or so later. She’s making more money, but now she’s in even more debt, and she’s feeling even more stressed. And so this time she decides that she wants to move forward. It’s like, OK, great, we’re going to get on top of this. And then right before we get started, something happened with her schedule changing at work, and now it’s not the right time again.

And so I pray that if I ever come across her again that she’s not in an even worse situation. Hopefully, she does decide that it’s time to get her finances in order and she can get that cleaned up, but I think her story is a really clear illustration of what I’m talking about with waiting for the right time. Where it wasn’t the right time the first time and things did not get better, right? She comes back. It’s still not the right time. Things are still not going to magically get better.

She’s going to have to decide to take action to manage her finances better, to clean up the debt, all of that kind of stuff.

Life is always going to be busy. There’s always something going on. We don’t tend to have fewer responsibilities as time goes on, we tend to have more responsibilities as time goes on. Right? There’s always something happening.

My granny always says, “Time and tide wait for no man.” And what that means is time is going to pass whether you do anything with it or not. If you have something you want to do, you better do it while you’ve got the time to do it.

I remember hearing this poem from Zig Ziglar. He did not write the poem, but he recited this poem or included this poem in a book that I read and the poem said:

The bride white of hair is stooped over her cane,
Her footsteps uncertainly guiding,
While down the opposite aisle with a wan, toothless smile,
The bridegroom in wheelchair come riding
Now, who is this elderly couple thus wed?
Well, you’ll find when you’ve closely explored it,
That here is the rare, most conservative pair
Who waited till they could afford it.

That poem is attributed to Ogden Nash and the key message there is sometimes we put things off too long. We keep waiting, and there are real consequences to waiting.

So in the context of personal finance, which we’re talking about here, if you’re waiting to get on top of your finances, waiting to learn how to manage your money better, you end up not being able to save.

So like for example, let’s say that you are currently spending everything you make. Maybe you’re spending more than you make. And you could decide today that you’re going to change it, but you decide it’s not the right time, and you wait a year.

Let’s say you’re overspending by $500 a month. Well, now that’s $6000 more debt you have at the end of a year.

Let’s say that you could have cut that spending to where you were spending $1000 less each month. Well, now that’s $12,000 of savings that you missed out on not to mention the interest on both of those.

So with the debt you’re going to accrue interest with the savings you could have earned interest.

And then on top of the actual numbers, there’s the emotional side of it. The stress that you feel, the uneasiness, the worry, the sleepless nights, all of that stuff means that by not taking action now, by not going ahead and making the decision that now is the time you end up missing out on savings, ending up more in debt and dealing with another year of the stress and the worry and all of those negative emotions that you may be feeling.

Often, when people wait, and they keep doing the same things, they end up stuck. They’re stuck in the same patterns month after month, and it feels even harder to break free. So I want you to decide that it’s the right time. We’re not waiting for the right time to magically appear. It’s not going to happen. You’ll be waiting forever. You have to decide that now is the right time.

And just like in other areas of life, like you don’t wait, necessarily, for the right time to get married, like the elderly couple in the poem that I shared. You don’t wait until the right time to start your family, like there just isn’t a right time. You have to just decide and you’ll figure it out.

Things aren’t going to perfectly line up and everything feels like it’s magically right, you get to decide that now is the right time.

And I want to share too, that when you get started, when you decide it’s the right time and you decide to get started, you don’t have to go from where you are to personal finance expert overnight. Just start with one thing.

Today is the day that you’re going to manage your money better. I’m going to start with looking at how much I spent last month. I’m going to start with looking at all of my debt and creating a list where I have all of the details of it so I can figure out how I want to move forward. I’m gonna start by looking at how much I have in savings and where I can make some changes to be able to put more money in savings. Whatever it is, you don’t have to do everything, but you do have to do something.

This is my encouragement to you that there is no right time. You can start now. You decide that the time is right and once you make that decision then your actions will start lining up with it. But it all starts with deciding that the time is right, not waiting for the right time.

Alright. So that is it for this week’s episode. Please take a second and subscribe to the show. Leave a review if you have not done so already. Those things help the show get pushed out to more people so that more lawyers can find this information and be able to manage their money better.

As always, I appreciate your support.

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 take back control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve.

Talk to you later.