Today's discussion is in the area of financial literacy. What do you actually do with the money you earn? Paying yourself first is a simple strategy, which can completely change your finances for the better. Paying yourself first s a reverse budgeting strategy where you build your spending plan around savings goals, such as retirement, instead of focusing on fixed and variable expenses. This prioritizes savings, but not at the expense of necessary expenses like housing, utilities, and insurance. Disclaimer: I'm not a financial advisor and this is just my opinion, based on my experience, shared for informational purposes only - this is not financial advice.
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About the 6-Figure Practice Program:
The Six Figure Practice with Sasha Raskin, is an online program and community for helpers such as counselors and coaches, who are building their private practice. If you’re looking for a clear, step-by-step road map for creating and marketing your private practice, you're at the right place!
My name is Sasha Raskin. I’m a Number 1 Best Selling Co-Author in 12 Countries, a Doctoral student in Counseling Education and Supervision, a coach, a psychotherapist and an adjunct faculty at a graduate counseling program at Naropa University.
One of the things I’m enjoying the most is helping other therapists and coaches build their successful private practice so that they could actually help the clients they were taught to help, and thrive themselves. I’m almost always fully booked, so my ability to work with individuals is limited. That is why I’ve created this program to deliver powerful results and create a community where you will feel supported by each other!
This program's primary goal is to help you build a thriving private practice, in a fun and authentic way. Counselors and coaches invest an incredible amount of time, money, and effort into building their helping skills. However, when their training ends, they usually find themselves lacking the business skills that are needed to start and run a successful private practice, feel isolated, discouraged and not knowing where to start.
I believe that to be truly helpful to others, therapists and coaches have to learn to thrive themselves and definitely know how to get clients whom they can help.
This is where this program comes in. If you're willing to learn and work hard, a 6-figure private practice is within your reach in a year - 2 years. This program will give you a clear outline, and detailed instructions on how to get there.
Financial Strategies For Your Life Coaching Business
Let's give people a few minutes to join us. This is Sasha Raskin, I'm a counselor, I'm a coach. I'm going live both on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. If you're watching this on either my private Facebook or on any other medium definitely join our Facebook group, it's a free Facebook group called successful private practice counselors and coaches. And you can just search for it on Facebook to get notified of all the daily lives. I'll be sharing a lot of tips on how to market, how to grow your private practice.
And today I want to talk about something that's not really being talked about, about private practice, which is actually what do you do with that money whether you're just starting or already grew your private practice. And it's in the area of financial literacy.
So a quick disclaimer - I'm not a financial advisor. I'll just be sharing something that really helped me in my finances and running my private practice. So this is not an advice. Definitely talk to a financial advisor or any other people who know what they're talking about. This is just for informational purposes. So disclaimer is done.
Let's talk about pay yourself first. This is a saving and investment strategy. And it's a pretty revolutionary even though it's very simple. To put it simply - what you do is before you pay your credit card, your bills, whatever it is, you first give yourself a salary. And that salary goes into long-term savings and investment. And I'll give you an example. The best way for me at least to understand concepts is using examples.
So the idea is this, let's say you have money coming in, in your private practice let's say every two or three days, right? Because we don't get salary, we get paid from clients. So what I do every morning is I sit down with my savings account, investment account, and I do automatically according to my plan some moving around of money. So just to use a round number, let's say I was paid today a hundred bucks, right? So in advance I decided that I have two buckets.
I'm going to take 20% of what I earned and put it into two different buckets - 10% will go into my long-term investment account, high-yield investment account, that is not in my bank account. For me it's easier to separate it, far from site. And the other 10 is going to my investment account in which I use, I won't go into it today, all weather portfolio which is basically allocating my funds to different assets. It's easier than it sounds, all you need to do is Google all weather portfolio. And it works in different conditions of economy, whether those recession or whether those inflation, deflation, etcetera.
So the main idea with this is have you ever found yourself whether you had a good month or a bad month, you earned less - all money was gone till by the end of the month, right? So what you want to make sure that you're doing is that you have something to show for it, not just constantly paying your bills and living from salary to salary. And that can be done by kind of tricking your brain into first putting that long-term money away for investments and savings and only then using the money that's left.
Now once you create a habit it's actually pretty easy to keep up with. And the habit in my mind is more important than the bucket size. So all you need to do if you have never tried that, and you want to try that let's say for a month and see if it works for you, is I would decide on the bucket size. For example, an easy way to start is 5%. I'm going to put away 5% of my income, again, go in there and transfer that money as soon as it comes in, those 5%, into a separate bank account, high yield savings account. And just see for a month if it works, right?
You might be, if you've never tried that, you might be saying, "Well, yeah, I'm kind of stretching my budget anyway and I'm not sure I can start saving right now." Well, the best time to start saving is yesterday, best second time is today, so if you take only 5% to start with you probably won't feel it that much, right? Or even start with 1%. It doesn't really matter; it's just creating the habit. And later on as your private practice grows you can increase it.
So I hope it'd been helpful. In terms of resources that was just an introduction to the whole concept and the way I'm doing it. You can Google two things, (1) pay yourself method and the second one is all weather portfolio by Ray Dalio which is how to diversify investments in a way that it will work both when there's a crisis and recession and also when things are good. So I hope it's been helpful.
If you'd like some help with building your private practice all you need to do is just comment below with the word details and I'll send you the details, I'll reach out and send you the details about our private practice accelerator where we help counselors and coaches grow their practice and fill it as soon as possible for whatever filling it means to you, right? During this month we had two or three counselors fill their practice, done, right? Now they can ... one of them is hiring her next ... her counselor that will work for her. Another one is kind of okay, I'm good at this place. So if you want to be next, just let me know. Either message me or comment and I'll send you all the details. Have a wonderful day.