Discover your reasoning for why you want to build your net worth.
Hello follow Protagonists,
So here we are, the first post of The Mindful £100K series.
After the next 4 weeks you will a have a sound understanding of some of the key financial, personal and spiritual principles that I used to reach my first £100K in net worth. The hope is that you can take on, or adapt, some or all of these principles to get you pointing in the right direction to reach your first £100K, or to add another £100K to your net worth. To get the full details read the introduction.
How does that sound to you adventurers?
It is important we establish that we are talking about £100K in net worth. For a recap of why we are focusing on net worth and not income please read this.
All good?
So the first, and arguably most important task we are going to do is work out why we want to build our wealth in the first place. When you boil it down, money is only a tool that can be used in any way we wish. Money itself is such a strange concept. It is a potential enabler, helps make trading of services and products easier and what multiple studies have shown us, will not make us any happier. So why do we want to build wealth?
This was an initial mistake I made at the beginning of my journey. I do not think that I had a real reason to build wealth. Like doing it for the sake of doing it. Seeing other people with nice things and wanting them too. Not a very helpful viewpoint and I will explain why.
Motivation for most things can be split into one of two categories, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Our intrinsic motivation is what we are after. Intrinsic means that our reasoning comes from within and the act itself is what we find satisfying, rather than being driven by an external reward or aversion of punishment.
Some examples of aversion of punishment could include only completing some pointless tasks at work so that you don't get bollocked for it by your boss, or only helping out somebody just to avoid potential confrontation or to not look bad to others. We don't really want to focus on achieving things for the sake of how it looks to others.
This gets interesting when we are talking about money, as money is an external motivator. What we can do is find the intrinsic motivation underneath building wealth. Finding a task internally motivating means that we do not have to keep searching for reasons to complete something or act in a certain way. This can be a life-saver as our motivation can dip and change weekly, daily, even hourly.
A sense of meaning or progress is a great internal motivator. We are completing something for the purpose of learning about ourselves or gaining new skills. We may want to test ourselves to see if we are capable of achieving a set goal.
Freedom and choice can be a common motivator around wealth creation and certainly something I can relate to with my own personal reasoning. It is about why we want that freedom which for me differentiates the internal from the external. I wonder if we want the freedom to be able to focus on what matters to us more, to feel that we work because we want to rather than feel forced to. The freedom could also provide additional time to support other people.
Security is something I used to think motivated me until I realised that nothing is truly secure. I think Covid has shown us that recently.
Spend some time to find reasoning that you feel good about because of an internal desire. Something that is core to you and is unlikely to move or fluctuate.
This will make wealth creation so much easier. On days when all we can think about is spanking our change on something we don't really care about, it is our core values that can pull this around. This is why doing something in order to look good to somebody else is such a bad driver when it is truly tested.
There are debates around what internal motivation really means, and if it even exists. I will leave that decision to you. There are discussions around a third type of motivation, family, which was definitely included in my personal reasoning.
This may sound odd but I did not set myself the goal to reach £100K. I had my internal motivators in place and I decided on a set of core principles I was going to follow and the net worth builds itself. As I have repeated a few times on The Daily Buff...
The journey is more important than the outcome.
Now that we have checked in with our reasoning to build wealth, before we move on I want to share with you the snapshot of my net worth and where it came from when I reached £100K. I told you that I wanted to share my experience with no secrets or hidden factors and that is how I mean to continue.
I have refrained from using the terms asset and liability as I feel this can confuse people with what I believe a true asset is. For more information please read this.
What I own
House Capital - £71,776.74
Pension fund 1 - £48,022
Pension fund 2 - £445.70
Car - £5400
Cash ISA - £1,873.38
Total - £127,518.60
What I owe
Student Finance - £20,000 (probably slightly lower but only get annual statements)
Net Total - £107,518.60
Go on be honest, were you expecting more columns?
It is very simple and that's the way we like it at the at The Daily Buff. Personal finance and wealth creation does not have to be confusing. This is something I want to share with you all through this series.
In time we will be breaking down each of these sections of my net worth and the core financial principles I followed whilst also including plenty of focus around self-development and spirituality.
The next post of The Mindful £100K will be looking into my main contributor, housing.
For anybody who wants more information/support to help identify their core intrinsic motivation, contact me at thedailybuff@gmail.com
GLHF
Warrick