What Does Financial Success Actually Look Like?

When you stop to think about someone who is financially successful you might think of luxury, a certain amount of money in the bank, perhaps a particular way of dressing or a specific type of car.

In my work with diverse people who want to get better at finances, I can tell you that these ideas of financial success are very far from reality.

Assuming we are talking about sustainable and meaningful financial success, then there is definitely a lot more than meets the eye.

This year I have worked with clients for whom our working sessions resulted in these successes:

Learning to celebrate

This client came to me to learn to invest and manage her income-expense behavior. When we looked into her story, goals and actual financial position we learned she was actually doing well as measured by having the ability to make a living for herself, and effectively using her money to live, have fun and invest.

She had an investment that for the average Joe was really hard to do, but she perceived it as an expense. So one of the first successes with this client was reframing that outgoing cash-flow as an investment instead of an expense to suffer through.

The second shift this client experienced was an understanding that she could enjoy her achievements more if she actually took the time to celebrate them. Before this shift, she would move from completing an achievement into starting the next project. This is a common event and many people fail to find joy in what they do even if in the eyes of others they are extremely successful precisely because they do not take the time to enjoy that success.

Notice how in this story success is not defined so much as an amount or a brand or a particular lifestyle, but about the internal emotional beliefs this person had around money.

Acknowledging each step along the way

People tend to feel inadequate because they want to invest but they do not know a single thing about how to or where to start from. When we get comfortable with the idea of being beginners at something, instead of feeling stupid or inadequate because we do not know something, we approach it with curiosity and we accept that there will be a learning curve and there will be more questions than answers.

This is how I like to help my clients step into their investment journey. Each of them will have different preferences in the amount of information they want to absorb as we build their plan, but I want them to be aware of as much as they can.

In the end, it is not about checking a box, but acknowledging that a few things will take a few steps and repetitions until they become an integrated part of our lives. Managing money should be like dental care: annual check-ups for the big picture (rebalancing our portfolio) and daily habits like flossing (mindful earning and spending so we can save and invest).

A client I work with this year had an investment that she had acquired as a friend’s recommendation, but she did not fully understand it. I wanted her next investment to have a clear vision of what she wanted her portfolio to look like, what were the life goals this investment would serve, and how to make her next investment choice based on these two pieces of information. During 3 sessions we worked on exploring her dreams and goals, then on learning the fundamentals of investing et voilà! She added a new instrument to her portfolio by herself and she knew why she had picked it!

Financial success is therefore about much more than numbers

Admittedly, financial success comes with having some basic numbers in order: making enough money to cover my basic needs, and then some more to go beyond basic needs. Having a healthy income-to-savings ratio, and rather than saving my money under the mattress, learning to invest it to protect the value it can provide me with or even better, grow it.

But the pure numerical calculations will not bring us the confidence, certainty and maturity that comes with truly being content with our finances and life in general.

These stories illustrate what I mean when I say financial success goes deeper than numbers.

I will live you with a question: do you think you are financially successful?

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If you’re ready to develop this kind of financial maturity, I’ll be happy to be your mentor. Or you can take my self-paced course Foundations of Financial Maturity.