Effective Objection Handling

Effective Objection Handling

A couple of years ago, I was asked by a senior leader to design a program that would help the sales team qualify more deals. The biggest obstacle to closing new business was how the team was managing customer objections.  As the customer mentioned an objection, some reps on the phone would become defensive and start to justify the merits of our company or product. Others just took the objection at face value, hung up and moved on to the next customer on their list. However you look at it, these are missed opportunities.
Objections are inevitable but should never be seen as a door slamming closed in your face. The key is to understand why the customer is objecting – you must take the time to uncover this if you hope to move forward in a mutually beneficial way. While customers may object for many reasons, let’s take a look at few common causes:

• May simply be lack of knowledge: “We don’t need a mobile solution.”
• May be a specific, warranted concern: “Your price is higher than everyone else.”
• May represent a hidden agenda: The customer has a preference or incentive to use a different product but doesn’t say that outright.
• May be a perception issue: “The Cloud isn’t secure.”
• We may not be clear about their interests: “That’s not a priority for me this year.”

Take action: Think about the objections you receive in your line of business. Write down an example for each of the above types of objections. The techniques in this article will assist you with these and many more that you’re likely to face. You may not overcome them every time, but at least you didn’t give up before even trying.
Now that you have written down the most common objections, here are some of the top tactics for handling them:

Tactic #1: Gratitude

Say “Thank You!”  Always thank your customer when they put an objection in front of you because this is an opportunity to address it and move on with your deal.  In fact, ask them about all of their concerns and objections right up front and you’ll receive even more opportunities to turn the table to your advantage. Don’t forget, an objection is better than a “no” because it gives you some place to begin the conversation. I can’t tell you the number of times a simple thank you has helped to diffuse a situation with an angry or upset customer and get me on my way to solving their problem or getting them back on the happy train.

Tactic #2: Empathize

Empathy is a way to connect with your customer on a personal level, show you care and that you’re listening. All of us have had to say “no” at one time or another, and in business, you’re not always speaking to the decision maker. Often times, they’re just the messenger so don’t shoot yourself in the foot by getting defensive. After thanking the customer for bringing the objection to your attention, empathize in a way that will help further diffuse the situation. For example: I hear this a lot, I’m sorry you feel that way, it sounds like this has been very frustrating, I hear what you’re saying and I think I can help. By empathizing with the customer, they’re more likely to open up and share more.

Tactic #3: Let the Discovery Begin

Now that you’ve begun to diffuse the situation, take your time to uncover what’s really going on. Good customer discovery always focuses on asking open-ended questions. If the customer can respond with a “yes” or “no,” then you’ve got to rephrase your question. This is a lot harder than it sounds and it takes practice to develop this ability. You can test yourself at home or with a friend – have a conversation with someone and only ask them open-ended questions. If you get stuck, just do what every 4 year old does and ask “why?” -- you’ll be amazed at how powerful that little question can be! Building rapport is equally important during the discovery phase.

Tactic #4: Ask, Probe, Confirm

Now that you’ve got the questions flowing, it’s important to keep the conversation moving further and deeper. As the customer responds to your open-ended questions, you should probe further by asking more questions about what they’ve just said. If at any time you don’t understand something, ask them to clarify.  A great example of this tactic is when the customer mentions an acronym or other words specific to their company or business process. Experts say that it takes at least 4-5 layers of questions to really uncover the pain or nature of the objection. Take your time and keep asking questions until you truly understand the reason for the objection and they’ve satisfied you’re curiosity.  Finally, restate what you heard in your own words and ask them to confirm that you’ve understood them correctly.

Tactic #5: Show Them The Value

To keep your customer around for the long haul, they must see value in your product or service. The purpose of good discovery is to understand what’s important to them, why it matters, and what their business would be like without your product or service. When you uncover a pain, your next step should be to quantify what that pain is costing the business. If the customer continues to object or restate the same objection then you’re not asking the right questions to align your value to their pain. Pain can cost a company in a different ways; lost revenue, wasted time, customer satisfaction, employee turnover and more. By taking the pain point and expanding on it, the rep can then encourage the customer or prospect to quantify the problem in business and personal terms thereby convincing them that purchasing a product/service to resolve the issue is worth the investment.

Tactic #6: Back It Up With Proof & Customer References

Now that you’ve gone through steps 1-5, it’s time to back up your statements with industry research, customer references or customer success stories to prove the value of your product or solution. For research, find out what analyst firms say about your industry or product and incorporate this data into your conversations. I’ve had great success getting new customers interested by mentioning what leading industry analysts say about our products. Customer references are another great tool because those stories often represent a pain or objection that was overcome with success. I challenge everyone I mentor to learn at least 3 new and relevant customer stories a month. Overtime, your stories will set you apart from others and give your customers another reason to trust you with their business.

Managing objections requires practice. Take these 6 rules and apply them to your business. You’ll see very quickly that they do work. We saw immediate increases in qualified leads and higher close rates in a very short time by employing these techniques because we were able to demonstrate how our product can be used to overcome real pain in their business.
Peter Drucker once said that “The quality in a product or service is not what you put into it, it’s what the customer gets out of it.”   Think about what’s in it for the customer, take what you’ve learned from your discovery and wrap your solution in terms of values and benefits that will uniquely help them – this is how you delight your customers.

10 Things To Consider Before You Hit Retirement

By Zi Yao Lim . 31 December 2014 .

You have been working your whole life, saving for your retirement. Most of us have millions of ideas about what it’ll be like when it finally comes to the moment where we break away from the 9-to-5 rut. However, with a few more years to go before the day finally arrives, it’s time to take serious action, and get things in order for your golden years ahead.

Most of us would want to achieve financial freedom by then and having not to worry about money any further. To ensure everything is in order when your last conventional pay cheque comes your way, here are 10 things you need to do:

1. Decide on your goal

Many a times when we plan for our retirement, we don’t have a clear picture of how we really want to retire. Do we want to retire at a small and quiet village, outside of town, or perhaps stay in a small(ish) condominium in town, where everything is within walking distance?

By this time, with just a few years to your retirement, you should really have a clear idea whether you want to upsize or downsize your lifestyle post-employment.

The first question you ought to ask yourself is what you want after you retire. Travel around the world and eventually, retire at one of the Caribbean islands? Whatever your goal is, you need to align your retirement plan towards achieving it.

2. List down your obligations

Before embarking on your adventure after retirement, you should consider any financial obligations you may have that can adversely affect your finances after employment.

Do you still have dependents (parents or children) you have to support even after you retire? Will your child(ren) still be in college, with hefty tuition fees coming your way every few months?

How about your lifestyle? If you have planned for your retirement optimally, you should not have to downsize your lifestyle too much. The key word here is sustainability. You should have a clear idea of how much you need every month during your retirement, and how long your retirement fund will last.

3. Clear your debt

Ideally, you should have cleared all your debts before you hit retirement. By clearing your debts, you improve your net worth and credit rating which might be helpful should you need to take another loan in the future.

Credit card debts are usually the first priority to be cleared off due to its high interest rates, followed by personal loans and car loans. There has been an ongoing debate on whether home loans should be cleared off sooner than needed for the peace of mind of being debt-free. If you think paying off home loan last is a better idea, perhaps you should look into the option of refinancing your mortgage.

Currently, Malaysia’s base lending rate is at 6.85%. Comparing with the historical rates, it might seem to be a little high too high to refinance your mortgage. But consider this: after retirement, you’ll lose your primary source of income (for some, only source of income) and your ability to take up a new loan diminishes.

If you have to refinance your mortgage by then, banks might quote you a higher rate, require a guarantor, or simply reject your application. Perhaps it might be a good idea to lock in a fixed mortgage rate to avoid being exposed to interest rate volatility in times of economic uncertainty.

4. Preserve your assets

When we are still earning an income, we mostly focus on accumulating assets. However, when retirement hits you, more focus should be put on preserving your existing assets.

A person may own multiple properties and be worth millions of Ringgit, but he or she may not be able to even afford lunch! In finance, two terms arise: solvency is the ability to meet its long-term ( more than two  years) financial obligations, and liquidity is the ability to meet short-term (less than two years) obligations by converting assets quickly into cash.

In other words, how we preserve our assets depends on our ability to sustain our short-term needs (daily expenses and outflow) without needing to liquidate (force sale) our assets. Consolidating your assets by consulting wealth management and financial planning advisories may be a good idea to have clearer view of your current financial health and have more control in monitoring and preserving your assets.

5. Create or update your will

To prevent your family from exploding into those family feuds infamously depicted in Hong Kong soap operas, updating your will (or create one if you don’t have one yet) is essential. Jokes aside, it is important to have estate planning so that you can be assured that your family is being taken care off  in the manner of your preference.

Having a will doesn’t just ensure your hard-earned assets are distributed properly and rightfully, according to your wishes, it also helps your family go through the process quicker and with greater ease. Remember, avoid hassles by having different wills for assets in different countries and jurisdictions.

6. Review your investment portfolio

As you retire, you would require a substantial steady stream of income to replace your previous conventional income that takes care of your daily expenses and other obligations.

As result, your capacity or holding power of your investment is limited. Perhaps toning down your investment appetite from aggressive high capital growth equities to a more conservative and passive, dividend paying funds such as bonds or government securities might be a good idea. Reviewing your risk tolerance is essential to sustain good cash flow and preserve your assets.

 7. Establish passive income

If the retirement you envisioned for yourself is one where you stop working completely, it becomes even more crucial for you to establish at least one source ofpassive income, which will be your new primary source of income.

As an alternative to your investments, you can also create another stream of income by working part-time or taking up freelance jobs. For those who have years of professional work experience, they can opt for consulting or an advisory role to other firms or institutions – this may not exactly be ‘passive’ but if it’s something you enjoy doing, it wont feel like a job for sure!

Setting up a mamak or a sundry shop as a small business might also be a good idea (seriously, mamaksrarely fail and typically have healthy profit margins).

8. Healthcare

The unfortunate thing with healthcare is that it becomes more expensive the older we get. Most people give up one their medical card due to the exorbitant price they have to pay — especially in view of the diminishing income after retirement.

Therefore, it is important for one to have a clear idea of their health and fitness level before they hit their golden years. Prevention is certainly better than cure.

Find out if you have any medical conditions that may require substantial amount of money to finance, especially when healthcare cost is escalating to the tune of 12% per annum. Maintain your medical card, review the policy to ensure it is adequate, then set up a budget for rainy days, that could include medical emergencies.

9. Withdraw your EPF

Should you withdraw everything or should you withdraw a set amount regularly? Prematurely withdrawing and depleting your EPF, even if you can, may bring adverse effect to your retirement savings. Unless you have a strong reason or solid financial plan to invest elsewhere that could potentially provide better returns, EPF should be remained untouched and used as a last resort as this will be retirement fund  for the next 10 to 20 years.

If you don’t think your EPF savings enough is adequate to outlive your retirement years, you can consider withdrawing some of the money for selected investments.

10. Continue working

Retirement is really just a phase that everyone goes through. According to the Life After Work survey conducted by HSBC, 22% of Malaysians plan to semi-retire because they need to bridge an income shortfall.

Review your retirement savings before your retirement to have an understanding of whether you stand financially post-employment. Will you be able to live comfortably on that savings, or do you need to continue working to generate income for your golden years?

For some, the idea of not doing anything for next one to two decades may not be conceivable at all! However, the point is to plan for your retirement so semi-retirement is an option and not a means to survive.

We need to start retirement planning as early as possible in order to have a comfortable retirement in years to come. However, planning your retirement is not just about saving money religiously, but also about making the right decisions at the right time to boost your savings.

These 10 steps should be done just a few years before you retire. This will still give you some room to make up for any shortfalls.

The 'Circle Of Competence'

The 'Circle Of Competence' Theory Will Help You Make Vastly Smarter Decisions                   

“I’m no genius. I’m smart in spots—but I stay around those spots.”
— Tom Watson Sr., Founder of IBM

The concept of the “Circle of Competence” has been used over the years by Warren Buffett as a way to focus investors on only operating in areas they knew best. The bones of the concept appear in his 1996 Shareholder Letter:

What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word “selected”: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.

It’s a simple concept: Each of us, through experience or study, has built up useful knowledge on certain areas of the world. Some areas are understood by most of us, while some areas require a lot more specialty to evaluate.

 

For example, most of us have a basic understanding of the economics of a restaurant: You rent or buy space, spend money to outfit the place and then hire employees to seat, serve, cook, and clean. (And, if you don’t want to do it yourself, manage.)

 

From there it’s a matter of generating enough traffic and setting the appropriate prices to generate a profit on the food and drinks you serve—after all of your operating expenses have been paid. Though the cuisine, atmosphere, and price points will vary by restaurant, they all have to follow the same economic formula.

 

That basic knowledge, along with some understanding of accounting and a little bit of study, would enable one to evaluate and invest in any number of restaurants and restaurant chains; public or private. It’s not all that complicated.

 

However, can most of us say we understand the workings of a micro-chip company or a biotech drug company at the same level? Perhaps not.

 

But as Buffett put so eloquently, we do not necessarily need to understand these more esoteric areas to invest capital. Far more important is to honestly define what we do know and to stick to those areas. The circle can be widened, but only slowly and over time. Mistakes are most often made when straying from this discipline.

 

* * *

The concept applies outside of investing.

Buffett describes the circle of competence of one of his business managers, a Russian immigrant with poor English who built the largest furniture store in Nebraska, thusly:

I couldn’t have given her $200 million worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock when I bought the business because she doesn’t understand stock. She understands cash. She understands furniture. She understands real estate. She doesn’t understand stocks, so she doesn’t have anything to do with them. If you deal with Mrs. B in what I would call her circle of competence… She is going to buy 5,000 end tables this afternoon (if the price is right). She is going to buy 20 different carpets in odd lots, and everything else like that [snaps fingers] because she understands carpet. She wouldn’t buy 100 shares of General Motors if it was at 50 cents a share.

It did not hurt Mrs. B to have such a narrow area of competence. In fact, one could argue the opposite: Her rigid devotion to that area allowed her to focus. Only with that focus could she have overcome her handicaps to achieve such extreme success.

In fact, Charlie Munger takes this concept outside of business altogether and into the realm of life in general. The essential question he sought to answer: Where should we devote our limited time in life, in order to achieve the most success? Charlie’s simple prescription:

You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence. 

If you want to be the best tennis player in the world, you may start out trying and soon find out that it’s hopeless—that other people blow right by you. However, if you want to become the best plumbing contractor in Bemidji, that is probably doable by two-thirds of you. It takes a will. It takes the intelligence. But after a while, you’d gradually know all about the plumbing business in Bemidji and master the art. That is an attainable objective, given enough discipline. And people who could never win a chess tournament or stand in center court in a respectable tennis tournament can rise quite high in life by slowly developing a circle of competence—which results partly from what they were born with and partly from what they slowly develop through work.

So, the simple takeaway here is clear. If you want to improve your odds of success in life and business then define the perimeter of your circle of competence, and operate inside. Over time, work to expand that circle but never fool yourself about where it stands today, and never be afraid to say “I don’t know.”

 

Circle of Competence is part of the Farnam Street latticework of mental models.

Read more: http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2013/12/mental-model-circle-of-competence#ixzz2mfGI0rTp

How to Set Goals: 10 Steps to Stay Focused

How to Set Goals: 10 Steps to Stay Focused August 29 by Sarah Hansen 

For most people, creating goals is easy! The execution and application is the struggle. As Diana Scharf Hunt says, “Goals are just dreams with a deadline!” Everyone has dreams, but successful people turn them into goals that they accomplish. In order to ensure you reach the finish line with your goals achieved, here are 10 steps to help you move from dreamer to doer.

1. Utilize the SMART Goal Approach

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. – Aristotle

SMART goals have been utilized for years, because they work. Make sure your goals are:

 

Specific:

 

A specific goal will usually answer the five Ws (What, Why, Who, Where, and Which). Writing specific objectives fleshes out your goal so you can easily identify what you want to accomplish.

 

Measurable:

 

If your goal isn’t measurable, there will be no way to know if you’re making progress. You need to address the question, “How will I know when this is accomplished?”

 

Attainable:

 

Your goal must be something that you can realistically attain. I would love to fly like a bird by jumping off a cliff with no parachute, but gravity would have the last word in that interaction. However, learning to jump off a cliff with a hang glider is more realistic.

 

Relevant:

 

If your goal doesn’t mean anything to you, then it isn’t worth pursuing. Tie your goals to your deeper values to give them more meaning. Make sure you are behind the goal 100% so you stay motivated to achieve it.

 

Time Bound:

 

You need to have a deadline. Otherwise it’s just a dream that never becomes reality. Putting down a deadline makes you more committed to bringing it to fruition.

 

2. Write your goals down and display them!

“I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.” – Chinese Proverb

 

A large portion of your goal is already accomplished as soon as you write it down. A study showed that among people who wrote down their goals with actionable commitments that they put into weekly progress reports and shared with friends, 76% accomplished them. This is in comparison to a control group who were just asked to think about their goals. In this group, only 43% accomplished their objectives. Writing down your goals makes them real; they are tangible words on paper, not an ethereal dream in your mind.

3. Break big goals into smaller ones!

“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!”

 

It’s the same for big goals! Break them down into manageable weekly and daily actionable bites. If you don’t, you can sometimes lose motivation if the goal seems far away or too big to accomplish.

4. Make an action plan and follow it!

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” – Benjamin Franklin

 

The best gift you can give yourself is a well thought-out action plan. Take time to organize all of your smaller daily and weekly goals in one place so you can easily check your progress or send it to others to hold you accountable.

5. Do your goals as early in the day as possible!

“The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.” – Thomas Jefferson

 

If you study successful people, you will find that most of the time they do more before the sun rises than the rest of the world does in a day. Get your goals done first thing in the morning to feel like you’ve started your day right. That way, you will always find time to do them.

6. Tell others your goals to keep you accountable!

“Accountability breeds response-ability.” – Steven R. Covey

 

When you know someone is going to check your progress, it lights a fire under you to follow through. Find a good friend or mentor who will take on the role of motivator and occasional butt-kicker. You will come to value this service immensely when you see your efficiency and effectiveness improve.

7. Make sure your goals excite you!

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” – Albert Einstein

 

Your goals should be a source of joy in your life. They should be one of the main reasons you get out of bed in the morning. If your goals don’t excite you, then you need to re-evaluate them.

8. Use positive language in your goals!

“The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.” – Jim Rohn

 

Setting and accomplishing your goals changes you. You become a positive person who is more excited about life. Make sure your goals reflect this. Don’t say, “My goal is not to mess up today.” Instead your goal could say, “My goal is to excel today in my career by doing X, Y, and Z.” Do you see the language difference? No one can get passionate about going through the day trying to avoid something negative. Instead, turn it around so you spend your day chasing and catching success.

9. Set goals in multiple life areas!

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” – Michelangelo

 

Don’t just reserve your goals for your career. You should challenge yourself to set fitness goals, finance goals, family goals, relationships goals, educational goals, spiritual goals, health goals, and adventure goals. Every area of your life that you value should have a goal to help you improve upon it.

10. Set performance vs. outcome goals!

“The ultimate reason for setting goals is to entice you to become the person it takes to achieve them.” – Jim Rohn

 

Many things are outside your control. For example, you may have an adventure goal to climb Mount Everest. You follow an action plan and train daily. You reach the moment when you are ready to ascend the mountain’s icy slopes with your team. Suddenly, a huge storm turns you back. The weather was out of your sphere of influence. You met all of your performance goals. Just because the outcome didn’t happen this time does not mean you failed. You were prepared. Life just happened and you weren’t able to climb the mountain – this time. However, regardless of the outcome, you became the person who could climb your mountain should life open the door. That’s the deeper endeavor. When you set your goals, don’t say, “My goal is to climb Mt. Everest by January 2014.” Instead, say, “My goal is to be completely prepared to climb Mt. Everest by January 2014, and to do all that is within my power to reach the top.” The first goal is only attainable if everything works in your favor. The second goal is completely attainable, as it depends solely on you.

 

“In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.” – Henry David Thoreau

 

So what are you aiming for? If your answer is nothing, then you probably won’t like what you get out of this life. Instead of simply drifting along reacting to what life brings you, take proactive steps to go out and create the future you want. While we can’t control everything that happens to us, we can control ourselves by following goals that bring out our passion for life.

 

 

 

 

Rules To Improve Your Financial /Retirement.

Rules To Improve Your Financial /Retirement.

The term “personal finance” refers to how you manage your money and how you plan for your future. All of your financial decisions and activities have an effect on your financial health now and in the future. We are often guided by specific rules of thumb – such as “don’t buy a house that costs more than 2.5 years’ worth of income” or “you should always save at least 10% of your income towards retirement.” While many of these adages are time tested and truly helpful, it’s important to consider what we should be doing – in general – to help improve our financial habits and health. Here, we discuss five broad personal finance rules that can help get you on track to achieving specific financial goals.

Do the Math – Net Worth and Personal Budgets

Money comes in, money goes out. For many people, this is about as deep as their understanding gets when it comes to personal finances. Rather than ignoring your finances and leaving them to chance, a bit of number crunching can help you evaluate your current financial health and determine how to reach your short- and long-term financial goals.

As a starting point, it is important to calculate your net worth – the difference between what you own and what you owe. To calculate your net worth, start by making a list of your assets (what you own) and your liabilities (what you owe), and then subtract the liabilities from the assets to arrive at your net worth figure. Your net worth represents where you are financially at that moment, and it is normal for the figure to fluctuate over time. Calculating your net worth one time can be helpful, but the real value comes from making this calculation on a regular basis (at least yearly). Tracking your net worth over time allows you to evaluate your progress, highlight your successes and identify areas requiring improvement.

Equally important is developing a personal budget or spending plan. Created on a monthly or annual basis, a personal budget is an important financial tool, because it can help you:

• Plan for expenses
• Reduce or even eliminate expenses
• Save for future goals
• Spend wisely
• Plan for emergencies
• Prioritize spending and saving

There are numerous approaches to creating a personal budget, but all involve making projections for income and expenses. The income and expense categories you include in your budget will depend on your situation and can change over time. Common income categories include:

• Alimony
• Bonuses
• Child support
• Disability benefits
• Interest and dividends
• Rents and royalties
• Retirement income
• Salaries
• Social security
• Tips
• Wages

General expense categories include:

• Debt payments – car loan, student loan, credit card,
• Education – tuition, day care, books, supplies, takaful
• Entertainment and recreation – sports, hobbies, movies, DVDs,
• Food – groceries, dining out
• Giving – birthdays, holidays, charitable contributions
• Housing – mortgage or rent, maintenance
• Takaful - health, home/rentals, auto, family takaful, PA
• Medical/Healthcare – doctors, dentist, prescription medications
• Personal – clothing, hair care, gym, professional dues
• Savings – retirement, education, emergency fund, specific goals (i.e. vacation), Hajj.
• Special occasions – weddings, anniversaries, graduation, restaurant
• Transportation – gas, taxis, subway, tolls, parking
• Utilities – phone, electric, water, gas, cell, cable, Internet

 

Once you’ve made the appropriate projections, subtract your expenses from your income. If you have money left over, you have a surplus and you can decide how to spend, save or invest the money. If your expenses exceed your income, however, you will have to adjust your budget by increasing your income (adding more hours at work or picking up a second job) or by reducing your expenses.

To really understand where you are financially, and to figure out how to get where you want to be, do the math: calculate both your net worth and a personal budget on a regular basis. This may seem abundantly obvious to some, but people’s failure to layout and stick to a detailed budget is the root cause of excessive spending and overwhelming debt.

Recognize and Manage Lifestyle Inflation

Most people will spend more money if they have more money to spend. As people advance in their careers and earn higher salaries, there tends to be a corresponding increase in spending … a phenomenon known as lifestyle inflation. Even though you might be able to pay your bills, lifestyle inflation can be damaging in the long run, because it limits your ability to build wealth: Every ringgit you spend now means less money later and during retirement.

One of the main reasons people allow lifestyle inflation to sabotage their finances is their desire to keep up with the Joneses. It’s not uncommon for people to feel the need to match their friends’ and co-workers’ spending habits. If your peers drive BMWs, vacation at exclusive resorts and dine at expensive restaurants, you might feel pressured to do the same. What is easy to overlook is that in many cases the Joneses are actually servicing a lot of debt – over a period of decades – to maintain their wealthy appearance. Despite their wealthy “glow” – the boat, the fancy cars, the expensive vacations, the private schools for the kids – the Joneses might be living paycheck to paycheck and not saving a dime for retirement.

As your professional and personal situation evolves over time, some increases in spending are natural. You might need to upgrade your wardrobe to dress appropriately for a new position, or, with the addition of a baby, you might need a house with one more bedroom. And with more responsibilities at work, you might find that it makes sense to hire someone to mow the lawn or clean the house, freeing up valuable time to spend with family and friends and improving your quality of life.

Recognize Needs Vs. Wants – and Spend Mindfully

Unless you have an unlimited amount of money, it’s in your best interest to be mindful of the difference between needs and wants so you can make better spending choices. “Needs” are things you have to have in order to survive: food, shelter, clothing, healthcare and transportation (many people include savings as a need, whether that’s a set 10% of their income or whatever they can afford to set aside each month). Conversely, “wants” are things you would like to have, but that you don’t need for survival.

It can be challenging to accurately label expenses as either needs or wants, and for many, the line gets blurred between the two. When this happens, it can be easy to rationalize away an unnecessary or extravagant purchase by calling it a need. A car is a good example. You need a car to get to work and take the kids to school. You want the luxury edition SUV that costs twice as much as a more practical car (and costs you more in gas). You could try and call the SUV a “need” because you do, in fact, need a car, but it’s still a want. Any difference in price between a more economical car and the luxury SUV is money that you didn’t have to spend.

Your needs should get top priority in your personal budget. Only after your needs have been met should you allocate any discretionary income toward wants. And again, if you do have money left over each week or each month after paying for the things you really need, you don’t have to spend it all.

Start Saving Early

It’s often said that it’s never too late to start saving for retirement. That may be true (technically), but the sooner you start, the better off you’ll likely be during your retirement years. This is because of the power of compounding – what Albert Einstein called the “eighth wonder of the world.”

Compounding involves the reinvestment of earnings, and it is most successful over time: the longer earnings are reinvested, the greater the value of the investment, and the larger the earnings will (hypothetically) be.

To illustrate the importance of starting early, assume you want to save $1,000,000 by the time you turn 60 years old. If you start saving when you are 20 years old, you would have to contribute $655.30 a month – a total of $314,544 over 40 years – to be a millionaire by the time you hit 60. If you waited until you were 40, your monthly contribution would bump up to $2,432.89 – a total of $583,894 over 20 years. Wait until 50 and you’d have to come up with $6,439.88 each month – equal to $772,786 over the 10 years. (These figures are based on an investment rate of 5% and no initial investment. Please keep in mind, they are for illustrative purposes only and do not take into consideration actual returns, taxes or other factors). The sooner you start, the easier it is to reach your long-term financial goals. You will need to save less each month, and contribute less overall, to reach the same goal in the future.

Build and Maintain an Emergency Fund

An emergency fund is just what the name implies: money that has been set aside for emergency purposes. The fund is intended to help you pay for things that wouldn’t normally be included in your personal budget: unexpected expenses such as car repairs or an emergency trip to the dentist. It can also help you pay your regular expenses if your income is interrupted; for example, if an illness or injury prevents you from working or if you lose your job.

Although the traditional guideline is to save three to six months’ worth of living expenses in an emergency fund, the unfortunate reality is that this amount would fall short of what many people would need to cover a big expense or weather a loss in income. In today’s uncertain economic environment, most people should aim for saving at least three to six months’ worth of living expenses, and more if possible. Putting this as a regular expense item in your personal budget is the best way to ensure that you are saving for emergencies and not spending that money frivolously. Keep in mind that building an emergency fund is an on going mission: Odds are, as soon as it is funded you will need it for something. Instead of being dejected about this, be glad that you were financially prepared, and start the process of building the fund again.

The Bottom Line

Personal finance rules-of-thumb can be excellent tools for achieving financial success. But, It’s important to consider the big picture and build habits that help you make better financial choices, leading to better financial health. Without good overall
habits it will be difficult to obey detailed adages like “never withdraw more than 4% a year to make sure your retirement lasts” or “save 20 times your gross income for a comfortable retirement.”