When trying to make a point, it’s always handy if someone completely unbiased can back you up. Well, I have to say thank you to the young lady who did just that at one of my money workshops. We were exploring the opportunity cost of our spending choices and, without going into too much detail as to what this means, the lady I mentioned told the class how she used to buy a Costa coffee every morning on her way to work. She then made a financial decision to substitute this with one of those ready-made cappuccino sachets that you can buy in packs of 10. She knew how much she’d save in the short term by doing this, but I thought I would take it one step further and work out how much she’d save herself in the long term (as much as I deny being a typical accountant, I do still love numbers. ‘They’ say money talks and I think that it does, although perhaps not in the way that ‘they’ mean).

Say you buy a small cappuccino from Costa every working day. At the moment, this will cost you £2.25 for a small one. You then decide to make better use of your money, so you also substitute this for one of those ready-made cappuccino sachets. If you buy these from most major supermarkets, they are about £2.99 for a pack of 6. You end up with a net saving of about £38 a month. Not a whole heap of cash, but wait…

What if you invest this monthly saving of £38 in a fairly low risk equity investment, perhaps a tracker of sorts? You could probably earn yourself a fairly conservative average rate of return of about 6% per year over the duration of your investment. Now remembering that equities are a long term investment, you do this for 40 years, from the start age of 25 until you retire at 65. What is the result?…

The result is that you would land up with an impressive £76k of which only £18k is the money you put in yourself, the rest is the capital growth on your investment. Not bad at all considering it’s all from having a cappuccino sachet as opposed to a Costa coffee.

Now I know you work hard and you want to be able to enjoy your money. That’s totally fine, I also enjoy the occasional coffee (lattes are my preference though). However, it’s my mission to show you that current choices that may seemingly not make much of a difference in the short-term can have a snowball effect in the long run. Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.

One of the reasons I do what I do is because I am passionate about seeing people pursue their dreams and fulfil their potential. The truth is many people are in jobs that leave them dissatisfied, frustrated and bored. Every morning they get up and drag themselves off to work. Or perhaps there are parts of their job that they enjoy e.g. the people, the occasional task / project, the money they earn, etc. But looking at the big picture, it doesn’t make them come alive. Sound familiar? This certainly used to be the case for me. We can make the mistake of accepting this as ‘just the way life is’. After all, the reality is that bills need to be paid and mouths need to be fed. But surely there is a better way to live life than just living from paycheque to paycheque? Surely there must be a way that we can do what we love to do without money being the reason we hold ourselves back?

Although there may be seasons in our lives where we have to take responsibility and do whatever it takes (as long as it’s legal J) to meet our financial commitments, there comes a time when we need to step out and pursue our dreams. Life is too short to do otherwise. But how can this be possible from a financial point of view?

1. The first key is in mastering the art of budgeting, saving and investing.

People often want far more than they will ever need, but because they don’t truly know how to budget effectively, maximise their savings and invest for the future, they end up with far less than they could have attained. We want to run before we can walk. But who builds a house without first laying the foundations? Sound financial techniques on saving, budgeting and investing are the foundations you need to set you up for life. If you understand and apply them, you will realise that:

• You can make your money grow so much more than you thought was possible.
• You can actually achieve your financial goals sooner than you imagined.
• You don’t need as much as you thought to live your life.
• You can achieve the future that you secretly hope for.

2. The second key is in realising that money won’t buy you happiness. You are far likelier to be more fulfilled earning less but doing something you love than earning more but being stuck in a job that simply just passes the time. Henry Wheeler Shaw said ‘Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won’t buy the wag of his tail.’

Play to your strengths and your passions i.e. find those things that you are good at and that make you come alive. Because we are all unique with our own talents, likes and dislikes, when we do what we love and what we are good at, we excel at what we do. We become a valuable resource which any decent business or organisation would want to have on their team. We make ourselves indispensable. Imagine a whole work force with this ethic, we’d have a booming economy!

I appreciate that this sounds easier said than done and that there may be other factors at work. Too often though, we give up before we’ve even given things a try. We settle for less. We look at the dream and it seems out of reach. My challenge for you today is to realise that it’s closer than you think. It takes determination and self-discipline. It takes delaying gratification and making some short term financial sacrifices in return for the long term gains. It takes a decision to get in the driver’s seat of your personal finances instead of having a que sera sera approach to managing your money. It takes courage to look our fears full in the face and to deal with them. It takes a deliberate effort on our part to discover those things that make us come alive. But at the end of the day, it can be done. When are you going to make the change?