From Scarcity to Abundance: Building a Sustainable Path to Financial Freedom | MONEY WITH SUNNY

Divorce can be emotionally and financially overwhelming. I'm teaming up with Sunny Wishart, president and founder of A la Carte Financial and a certified financial planner. We will show you how to understand all things money without feeling ashamed, overwhelmed, or embarrassed.

Sunny and I had a great discussion on the importance of embracing an abundance mindset to help you achieve lasting financial freedom. In this blog, we touch on topics such as the need to live within one's means, how to make mindful choices, and overcome a scarcity culture. We dig deeper into the significance of understanding personal wants versus needs and remind everyone once again about the value of building a financial buffer for occasional indulgences. Financial freedom is attainable through mindfulness, self-compassion, and strategic planning, irrespective of one's past or current circumstances.

Money is a resource. We need to learn about money. Understand it. Realize how it flows when it comes to achieving financial freedom and having enough money when we live in a scarcity culture.

To start, we need to be okay with living within our means especially because we have this scarcity culture, and we always feel like we never have enough. Maybe it's not the money. Maybe it's the way we're framing it. It's really rare to see someone comfortable and happy living within their means. So to be comfortable and happy living within our means, a good strategy is to have a failsafe. Once you know how much you’re earning and spending, it is easy to implement a failsafe for when you blow it all up. It is the buffer or the extra cash as a backup for situations where you go all out. So when you feel like you just want to blow some cash, you can. And there's enough money there to be able to do that.

When you feel like you don’t have enough, you just want to spend and spend and spend. You tell yourself you can’t have that but you still spend the money. Instead changing perspectives and thinking more along the lines of what you CAN have is more helpful than thinking about what you CANNOT have.

We tend to have a partial understanding of what our true wants are. Not needs, but wants and recognizing them and then accepting them. We don't want to do that. But we need to plan properly so that we don’t end up in a difficult financial situation. So it's all about how we decide to look at it. 

We have to have a WHY for doing what we're doing. A WHY is important when it comes to financial freedom. It's about being financially healthy and making healthy choices and then doing the 80/20. You need to make healthy choices 80% of the time. We can buffer out 20%, no problem. We often get stuck being hard on ourselves about what we should do or shouldn’t do. Instead, if we can set up a system where we're just mindful and make healthy financial choices, that’s a great foundation to have without being too hard on yourself.  

We’re living in a world of instant gratification. Everything is so fast and all the marketing has so much urgency to it. Maybe if we didn't have so much urgency on everything, it would be easier to not cave into instant gratification.

Our world today is fast and furious and puts pressure on us to have things right now. So, slow down to create the plan and think about what you want, look at your different options, and think about what healthy finances look like to you. And the 80/20 is critical because nobody can live doing anything 100% of the time. That 20% is the compassion, It's the kindness to yourself, it's the planning. And that's important. 

You can have financial freedom by being mindful of what you want to spend on your lifestyle and what that looks like and don't approach it from that scarcity. Learn to be okay with being mindful instead of feeling bad every time. 

So remember, you are worthy. You are loved, and you do belong. And if you need to talk to someone, you can schedule a call with me.

Wendy

xoxo