Expert shares the practical steps you can take to reach financial maturity.
Transcript:
CONWAY GITTENS: Bobbi, you wrote the book Launching Financial Grownups. From your perspective, what makes someone a financial grownup?
BOBBI REBELL: Well, first of all, thank you for asking about that book. The book was the second book to how to be a financial grownup. So it’s a series and it’s about learning how to be an adult with respect to your money. So it’s about resilience, about being intentional and deliberate with your money and making specific decisions that get you to your goals, that focus on your values, that focus on where you want to be, mean your numbers in life. All this math we talk about all this intimidating stocks and investments and savings and all the alphabet soup of different investments at the end of the day. It’s about writing your own money story, and that’s what being a financial grownup is all about.
CONWAY GITTENS: So you mentioned resilience and you mentioned being intentional. So what are some of the simple steps everyone can take in terms of being resilient and intentional?
BOBBI REBELL: One of the best ways to be resilient is to be prepared to know in advance. Well, here are the different scenarios that could happen with me. For example, right now there’s a lot of worry about the job market. The job numbers were revised and it’s not so great. So we should be thinking, well, do I have a plan in place? Plan A, B and C, if something were to happen and I were to have an interruption in income, it could be a pay cut. It could be losing your job. It could be just knowing that you could. So what is your plan A, B and C, you might have savings that you put to the side. You might have a plan to go. You know, if you have high overhead, how could you cut back on that overhead? You might have a side hustle, you might have a business, you start on the side, you might just be checking in on your investments and making sure that they’re positioned in a way that they can maybe throw off some income through dividends should you need a little more cash flow. But it’s really about knowing what could come your way and being prepared. And that in the end, will make you very resilient.
Somebody said to me to be very wise in my reporting days. I said, what if you don’t have enough money to retire? What’s going to happen to you? And they said, you’ll just course correct. In other words, so maybe you won’t go on the grand trip that you thought you were going to go on for 10 days. Maybe you’ll go on it for five days. Maybe you’ll go on it for a long weekend. It’ll be OK. Maybe you’ll work a little bit longer. Maybe you’ll take a different job. It’ll be OK. We have so much stress because we want to kind of tie it up with a bow. But at the end, the vast, vast majority of us are going to be OK. As long as we are resilient and intentional with our money and our money decisions.
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