What makes you happy?

You read well. You first need to know what defines your happiness. This feeling help you uncover some of your main values, and help you see what you want from life. Your values, and their relative importance, are key to a happy and a healthy life. Defining them precisely can be a long and demanding process *. We are not going into a detailed one here; after all, Rich Snail is not a NLP blog! No, we want to simply find out what makes you happy, so as to later define clear & definite SMART goals.

Which behaviors makes you truly happy?

You need to write down all the behaviors and situations where you feel happiness. You may find out that some of them can make you feel guilty and happy at the same time. Do not be afraid, write them down. Once you have your list, review it, and try to uncover new ways to find happiness without guilt for the entangled-feelings-ones. The resulting list will be your guideline.

Extract your values

The list you just wrote down will help you define your core values as every behavior or situation where you find happiness correspond to a value. You need to go through your list and find them. Analyze, decorticate, penetrate each behavior / situation to extract the value(s) answered there. You should end up with a small list of values. Once you wrote the list down, take a minute and congratulate yourself. We can now start defining and refining your goals.

* You can read the following article NLP & Values to discover more on the value topic.

The Big Picture

Those basics will help us draw a simple and easy-to-grasp big picture. They will guide us in defining what his goals are, what to work on, and and how to build sound financial foundations. My belief is that money management is not only about dollars and cents; it relates to one’s life goals and how money relates to them. Therefore we need to review where he wants to go and how to reach there.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone

I will post those rudiments over the next week in a series of posts named “The Basics of Personal Finance in 7 Days”. I will write a post per day, each describing a single step. As soon as a post will be live, I will add links to it here; so if you want to save them and have simple access to all of them, just bookmark this post.

Day 1: Assess the situation – Open your eyes
Day 2: Define and refine your goals – Where to go
Day 3: Track your spending – Where did it disappear to?
Day 4: Set up a budget – Your Treasure Map
Day 5: Get out of Debt – Fight for independence
Day 6: Emergency Fund & Insurance – Safety First
Day 7: Invest – House, College, Retirement, etc.