“Being free to stop doing stuff you hate means taking ownership of your choices in a radical way. It means being real with yourself and others about what matters most” – TK Coleman.
In this post I will be real with myself, and with you, the reader.
My Money Background
I have worked in accounting for the past four years, I balance my company’s cash account, I forecast our budget for days, weeks, months, years into the future, yet I am not the best when it comes to personal forecasting. To me my money is the scariest thing to take ownership of. It means digging into my spending habits, it means taking ownership of those habits, and it means making fundamental changes in my life.
I haven’t always been this way. When I quit my DC job to travel the country I had put $10,000 away to pay for my travels, eventual re-location to Denver and traveling back to Maine for the holidays. However, that was the last time I had savings. Since then I took a job with $15k less, quit that to take a job paying $10k lower than that. By the age 25 I’d passed up $25k in salary I once had (which I DO NOT regret).
This point is not so you feel sorry for me, but for me to help explain why I am in the situation I am today. Instead of facing my lower salary head-on, with a well thought out budget and spending habits, I spent money to enjoy today. Now I must deal with my tomorrow self who cannot enjoy as much.
Personal & Professional Development Plan
I am using the Praxis idea of a Personal [& Professional] Development Project (P&PDP): A short-term set of challenges with the goal of gaining self-knowledge, overcoming obstacles to success, and gaining mastery in areas of value to the individual and the marketplace, to improve my money spending habits and develop market insight in the evolving money-based FinTech community.
Personal Cash:
- Track every expenditure
- Determine goals for paying off debt
- Create a payment schedule to achieve those goals
- With that payment knowledge, create a budget to determine every expenditure I can actually afford
FinTech Research:
- Lookup five (5) FinTech firms per day
- Catalog each company based on a list of criteria (which I will post once I’ve developed it)
- Determine points of contact for each firm
- Develop a Fin-Tech marketplace “matrix”
- Look for opportunities that either aren’t being exploited or have few firms controlling the market
Measuring Success
Over the next 30-days I will work on my goals to clearly define my spending habits as well as develop a full understanding of market competitors in the world of transaction-based FinTech companies. At the end of the 30-days I will hope to have mastered my fear of personal cash budgeting and developed an understanding of the FinTech marketplace to start adding value to companies I truly want to work with.
I plan to continue blogging. Some blog posts may be on FinTech market research, some may be on my personal obstacles with my cash situation, and some may be on other things. I cannot guarantee any outcome from this project, but whatever happens it will be better than doing nothing at all.