Life Tools


Helpful tools for overall personal and financial growth.  You can't be successful financially unless you are confident and full in other areas of your life.  This is going to be updated as I think of additional useful items:

MOTIVATION
The below are ways to help you find the motivation to continue along your path to goal-setting.  In order to find your way through your financial disorganization, people from all walks of life can provide the right kind of motivation to drive you to your goals
  • Tony Robbins:  Awaken the Giant Within
    • This is great to start off your motivation.  Start believing in yourself and where you want to be in life and you will start finding ways to make that happen. 
  • Seth Godin's Blog (also author to several books, one being Linchpin)
    • This guy is a visionary for marketing advice & just overall business savvy
  • Dave Ramsey:  Author of several books, currently EntreLeadership & Daily radio show
    • So I've been listening to this guy for about a month now & I don't agree with all his points, but he's definitely onto to something with his down to the bare bones basics in finance & money.
  • Other industry companies or business leaders:  Follow people who are trying to accomplish the same goals or have finished them.  
  • Successful individuals who have accomplished a lot & hold similar values to you (famous or not):
    • Steve Jobs
    • Bill Gates
    • Family Members
    • Friends
    • Co-workers
    • Blogger, Twitter Followers, etc
    • Whoever gives you the energy to know that you can succeed!
  • Personal Goals:  An easy way for anyone to start putting their life on the right track is to focus on the future & stop worrying about the immediate pleasures
    • Dream about all the things you wanted as a child & see if they still match where you're headed now
    • Make a list of:
      • Short-term goals (done within a year)  - saving for holiday spending or
      • long term goals (done in the next 5 years) - being debt-free, paying off a car or saving for an exotic vacation
      • finally life goals (past 5 years) - paying off your house, paying for your kids' college, wedding, etc
  • Passionate:  This has come up with several of the speakers listed above & other books I've been reading recently. 
    • No one can be motivated to take action unless there is an undeniable drive and action for the change to occur.
    • Look at your life and where you are.  Are you happy with your decisions up to this point?  Can you make little changes today that will drastically affect tomorrow or next week? 
    • It's never too late to become passionate about how you want your life to be.  I don't know anyone who knew how they would be successful or what difficulties would lie ahead, but successful people all BELIEVED they would be successful.  It's as simple as that!  Amazing!
  • Spiritual: 
    • Looking at life and all the complicated decisions that occur, it's easy to become negative and feel like there's never going to be a change that will drastically change your life.  However, there is some universal faith, religion or spiritual belief among people that guides us to somehow conquer obstacles that would not otherwise occur.  As a mom, I think about the fear of my children being in danger & what I would do in an instant to help them or prevent something from happening.  There is an overwhelming force that any mom can relate to that makes us invisible in that moment & able to do things that would not otherwise be possible.   We could move a car or lift something twice our own weight if it meant saving our child.  It's that unexplained energy that people draw to and also relate back to their religion.  God can work miracles that may never be explained but we all know it wouldn't happen otherwise.
  • Vision Board: 
  • Roles & Goals
    • Another tip learned by Michelle McCullough (http://www.speakmichelle.com)
    • Go through the roles I play & see what needs I need to fill. Keeps me "on priority"
      • We all know we have too many roles to count: cook, housekeeper, mother, friend, wife, businesswoman, accountant, manager, scheduler, etc.
FINANCE
  • SIMPLE Budget (paper or computer)
    • Write your total income down & then make a seperate list of your expenses monthly. 
    • Many people can create their own budget, but if you aren't sure there's many simple tools online or go to daveramsey.com & he's got simple forms as well.
  • Excel
    • The simpliest way to start tracking your savings/expenses before you move to a more sofiticated software or application.  I'm sure there's many people that are still using the check book ledger but with a few very simple formulas, you can have excel do the math so you don't have to reconcile your math errors
  • Quicken
    • (great for home records of tracking all your debt/income in one place with reporting)
  • Quickbooks
    • used for small business but not much use on a personal finance level
    • has the basic financial statements and accounts needed to establish what's needed to start a small business
    • has an online version of this software, but it's not as robust as the installed version for the PC/MAC
  • Mint.com - http://www.mint.com/ has a great smart phone app to track all your personal expenses on the go.  Love it!

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