Living In Financial Excellence

Written by Matt Wegner, Founder and Lead Counselor, Matt Wegner Financial Coaching, www.financialexcellence.net.

Pay yourself first

There are hundreds, if not thousands of financial gurus out there, all spewing the same advice: live on less than you make, pay down debt, avoid credit, invest early and often, etc. It begins to sound like a broken record with them all saying the same stuff. But what I’ve begun to see is that many Americans are tuning the broken record out. The reason: too much noise and not enough valuable content. Everybody is saying what you should do but nobody is saying how to do it.

A prime example is the concept of paying yourself first. That phrase (or dare I say buzzword) has been uttered so many times over the last 20 years that people have become sick of hearing it. And whenever I mention paying yourself first in a coaching session with my clients, their eyes start rolling and their faces show an unmistakable look of disgust. When I press the issue I find that they have heard the term so much that they’ve tuned it out because they don’t really know how to pay themselves first and actually make it work in real life. read more