The best part of my job is listening to people’s ambitions and helping them achieve it. In most cases, it takes sacrifice now in order to make things happen later. A lot are not willing to make that sacrifice, so I have to ask myself, how much do they really want it?
The best example of people making sacrifices is people saving up for a new house, especially first time buyers. Couples are always telling me that they don’t go out anymore and bring packed lunches with them to work every day. Why? Because they dream of having their first home and they scrimp and save to fulfill that dream.
Loads of people want to retire early, knocking 5 years off what the rest of the colleagues are doing. Very few achieve it though. Why? They aren’t willing to make the sacrifice. It is expensive to retire at 60. As you have 5 years more spending and 5 years less time to save it in, you really have to save as much as you can to make it happen. When I run the numbers for people, they just shrug their shoulders instead of seeing what they can cut in order to increase their savings.
But I think it goes deeper than that. What I gave them is just numbers. There is no emotion attached to them. What if you could see and almost touch your goal? What if your dream was to travel around Australia? Would a picture of Ayers Rock work more for you than a spread sheet?
What about everything else in between? There are so many things that we want to do but we only have a finite amount of money. So what gets put at the top of the list and what at the bottom? And what are you going to to do make it happen?
Let me know what is the most important ambition that you want to achieve by dropping me an email at steven@bluewaterfp.ie