I was working through this process recently with two of my clients, a couple who were wanting to get into the property market. They had been thinking loosely that they wanted to do this for a while, but had never spent the time to sit down and put together their plan.
The first step was to understand their goals, which was to buy a property, but importantly they wanted to do this without having to give up on their annual overseas holiday or impact their lifestyle too severely. Seems fair enough.
These clients got a lot out of in particular going through steps two and four, understanding what was possible and then building the plan. These clients had thought property ownership was a long way away, but what they found is that even with a cashflow plan that gave them the lifestyle they wanted (annual holiday included), they were still able to get the property they wanted in under two years.
I’ve been working with these same clients since, and every time we catch up they tell me how motivating it is that they know exactly how much they need to get what they want, and that each month they can ‘tick off’ their progress toward their target.
If you set yourself up with this sort of plan, I find that most people are much less likely to get off track because they can directly see the consequences. They know that getting off track means they have to sacrifice somewhere else, or delay getting what they want – and nobody wants that!
I’ve seen clients other clients that when going through this realise that if they just make a couple of small changes, it’s going to help them get to their goals much faster and easier than they were going to before.
The other really powerful thing about this process is that once you have it all on paper, it’s often very motivating that you can see your situation unfolding and getting the things you want. This means that you’re less likely to drift off track because you’re going to know that it means you have to delay getting to your goals which is something you really want. Powerful stuff.
