Living your dream is your choice!

2009 had two significant events that nearly derailed me—I lost my beautiful and inspirational mother to cancer, and had a terrible car accident that left me quite injured. At one point, I questioned everything. Was I successful? Was I truly making a contribution to my clients and my community? If I couldn’t continue as a financial planner, what would I do? Was all the effort worth it? Did I feel good both physically and mentally? Were my “friends” really my friends? Was my life’s “dream” still my dream? For most of the year I felt alone and isolated even while surrounded by friends and family. I often felt lost and disillusioned. (I know. I’m the only one who’s ever felt like that!)

Enter Timothy Ferriss, author of the Four-Hour Work Week. In his remarkable book (available at Amazon.com), he asked two questions that hit me like a bolt of lightning:

1. If you had a heart attack and could only work 2 hours a day, what would you do, what would you delegate, and what would you let go. And if that wasn’t enough,
2. If you had a heart attack and you could only work 2 hours a week, what would you do, delegate, and let go?

This was an incredible answer to my dilemma with my injury. All I did was substitute “heart attack” and enter “car accident” and that was my life, my doctors’ orders. Immediately, I banished all thought of not being able to remain a financial planner. At that very moment, I started living my dream, injuries and all, using Tim’s tips, suggestions, and strategies.

The key to living our dreams is PASSION. What are you passionate about? What is it that you would scale a mountain for to shout from its top …”Now hear this …”? You might want to give some serious thought to this. I know I did. It’s all I could do while recuperating.

I sorted out quite a lot by asking myself the following questions:

• Did I want to?
• Was it an obligation?
• Does it serve me?
• Could I delegate it?
• Could I eliminate it?

It really is true that most of what we do is for ourselves even though we swear we “have to do it” in the name of our jobs, children, spouses, and friends. Decide to make different choices with your actionable time. By running your tasks, errands, meetings, relationships, reading, etc., through this filter, you’ll be amazed at how much you will be able to eliminate completely or delegate to someone else. This enables you to complete more work in less time, thereby freeing up time to work on things you are truly passionate about.

My recuperation started while working my financial planning business an hour a day until I could work longer. If you would have told me six months ago I would only be able to work 20 hours a week, I would have had a conniption fit and spiraled downward by the weight of self-imposed anxiety and guilt. But that didn’t happen. Instead, I learned how to put me first; something I could never do before. I’ve got more time to spend on the things I value most—my faith, my husband, my friends, and my clients. I never thought I would say that two of the most disturbing incidents in my life enabled a life-changing discovery I am truly grateful for. But then again, doesn’t the phoenix arise and fly out from ashes? Now I truly understand the beauty of the mythological lore.

How does this relate to financial planning? Well for starters, time is a priceless resource. This plan allows you to reclaim your time so you’re free to do what you were meant to do. By decreasing the hours spent on earning an income, yet maintaining or even increasing revenues, your income per hour rises. That makes good financial sense. Again, as a holistic financial planner, I like to look at the client’s life as a whole. This methodology feeds personal values and increases resources that guide and direct our investment policies and decisions, no matter if you’re an entrepreneur or employee. That’s why I’m sharing it with you. So what if it wasn’t all my idea, I learned a lot from Tim. So can you.

I challenge you to use this filter to weed out extraneous expenditures and activities. After a few weeks, take a little time to assess the changes and discover how much more time and resources you have and the impact of those results.

You can live your dream now if you live your life by intentionally choosing what to spend your precious time on and what not to. I choose faith, family, friends, and clients. How are you going to start smart in 2010?

Let me know by commenting below.

© 2010 Start Smart Advisor™, Inc.

How do we protect ourselves from the Madoffs of the world?

I’ve had some time to think about the sentence Bernie Madoff got for scamming the world, as they say. I was reading the June 30th posting of the Business Exchange, (http://bx.businessweek.com), when a linked article, “Time Is Money,” caught my eye. In this article, Liel Leibovitz, the author tries to wrap his arms around the magnitude of the Madoff scam and equate the dollars scammed to the years in prison. It’s actually quite entertaining.

To start, he estimated one year of Madoff’s 150-year sentence to equate to approximately $1.2 million per day. So in those terms it would take Madoff one hour to earn the average salary of an American teacher, or as long as 263 days to make the most expensive Hollywood movie in history which was “Pirates of the Caribbean,” starring Johnny Depp. That’s an enormous amount of money – and a mere 263 days to produce it with scammed dollars! Suddenly, 150 years doesn’t seem long enough.

As a financial advisor, it boggles my mind to think how Mr. Madoff could have gotten himself into this position without being a crook. For nearly 20 years the scam went on. He bilked his friends and family, those he loved most. Or can you call this love? How could he live with himself day-after-day, year after year? I was listening to one of the victims on the news after she had heard of his sentence. She said that Mr. Madoff could only be described as a psychopath. I have to agree with her. For myself, as an advisor, I wake up each morning wanting to better the position of my clients. The very thought of doing something that would harm them, makes me physically anxious just thinking about it. I do my best to protect my clients from financial harm; that’s my job. I believe most financial professionals have that very thought — they only want to do well by their clients.

So how do we protect ourselves from the Madoffs of the world? It’s hard to say. He’s a psychopath. He’s not cut out of the same cloth that you and I are. His intention was to deceive us and he did—all of us including the SEC. As a conman, he was incredulously successful. As for protecting ourselves from the likes of him in the future, we’re going to have to remain sharp. We have our own responsibility to make sure what we are getting involved in is legitimate. We’ll have to ask more questions more often and get second opinions from third-party advisors.

From the regulatory side we already know that new legislation is going to be coming down to protect us from future Madoff’s. However, the question I want to ask is this: where was the SEC? Doesn’t current regulation outlaw the behaviors of Mr. Madoff? How come they didn’t answer the call? I don’t believe we need more legislation, what we need is enforcement. The SEC let us down and in so many ways is very much to blame for the demise of many of Madoff’s victims. If they would have stopped Madoff the first time his ponzi scheme was brought to their attention, there’s a good chance many could have been saved from decimation or better yet, never been able to work with the man since he would already have been identified as a crook.

So while Mr. Madoff rots in jail where he belongs, the rest of us are left to pick up the pieces of the financial pictures he blew apart. Yes, Bernie Madoff had his victims, and they have been decimated. He has destroyed their futures. They most likely will never recover from the carnage. He has also singled — handedly destroyed the confidence in the financial markets in general. I don’t think there is a single person, whether they are an investor, an adviser, or other financial professional, that hasn’t been touched by this historical crime. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the end. Stay tuned, I know I am.

Copyright © 2009 Start Smart Advisor™, Inc.