Episode 003 -  Understand your money beliefs, management and how to attract more into your life

Hi, is Harms here and I am with Dr Ro, for another episode of the Seekardo podcast. And today we are talking about money. And just to help Dr Ro with some context on why I wanted to talk about this topic today is, my first real understanding and reflection on money was when I had to originally decide which career path I was going to take, when I was about 18 and 19 years old. So, I didn’t go down the conventional university roots. I actually went down the route of an apprentice, and when I look back in time it is fascinating, the decision I made on how to choose what career to take. So, I remember my mum and dad gave me some of the pamphlets on which apprenticeship to have a look at. One was for engineering, one was in the aviation industry, and there was another one as a BT engineer as such. And the way I decided on which career path to take was the projected salary they were going to pay me once I completed my apprenticeship. So, I made my decision, the decision for the next 30 to 40 years on what I would be doing in life based on a projected salary on a form. And one thing I don’t take into consideration was, am I the right person for this career? Am I interested in engineering, aviation or is it telecoms? And that is how I made my first ever career decision so, that actually links me to the thing I want to think about when somebody thinks about money, and this is now the question to yourself Dr Ro. When it’s about money, what should they be thinking? Where should they start when thinking about money?

RO:
Money, money, money! It’s a great question, I can’t stop smiling. How old were you when you made that decision?

HARMS:
I was from memory now; I was either 18 or 19 years old.

RO:
Wow. So, at that stage there at 18,19 years of age, you’re asking questions that related essentially to what could I earn in this career if I see it all the way through, which will ultimately lead to a certain lifestyle in the future. Is that correct?

HARMS:
That’s exactly correct, yes.

RO:
How did that lifestyle look for you?

HARMS:
Right so, here’s an interesting one.

RO:
Not that I’m coaching of course.

HARMS:
No of course not. But if you heard episode podcast number one, you’ll understand this part, so just check back into that part to get what we are talking about there. But what that looked like to me was, it was all based genuinely it was based around money and what material items I would have in my life at the time. So, when I was 18,19, it was right I’m going to be living in this part of the country, I’m going to have this size house. Maybe my kids might be able to go to private school, I want to be able to go on holiday this many times a year. That was how I was basing my decision. So, I was deciding, and it sounds crazy now I look back at it. I was deciding what career I was going to choose based on the lifestyle it was going to give me, regardless of I would have to be doing that career for the next 30 to 40 years. I just didn’t factor that part in.

RO:
Yeah, so I mean for those of you listening to this right now. Just be aware that when we start a podcast, Harminder and I discuss briefly beforehand the subject that he wants to cover. But we don’t structure it too much because it wants to be natural and slow. So, I’m throwing questions at him that he did not know I was going to ask him. And I think out of this point you’re making Harminder, I think this is important that we clarify at the start of this podcast what the key question is? And I’m guessing what you’re saying is, what is our relationship with money? Why do we make the decisions we make and why are so many people having challenges with money at the moment? Is that a fair overall observation of what you’re trying to lead to in this podcast?

HARMS:
I think those are spot on with the questions, because the belief and the relationship is almost at the start and that then plays out throughout somebody’s life. And then the final question you had which is around the decisions, that is then, how do I look back on that and change this decision I made about money many, many years ago. So, those three questions there are exactly spot on and I think if we go down those roads we’ll have a positive outcome for the people listening today.

RO:
Okay, so to try and put this in contrast and I think before we go any further, let me just give you a contrast. When I started back in my early days so when I was in my teenage years just after my father died, I was delivering newspapers and doing anything I could to work hard to generate as much cash as possible because my mother taught me one thing, if you want to make more money, you’ve got to work harder. So, she had these two jobs and I’ve talked about this previously that was my whole association with creating wealth, was work hard, work hard, work hard. I then went into a degree, got a job and I think I was on £16,000, £15,000 per year with a PhD, and I didn’t focus on money, that wasn’t my primary focus when I did the career. The original reason I did my career was because well you know you’re good at maths and good at physics, and if you want to get a good job for life then do this career. So, it wasn’t so much money focused. But to put that in contrast £16,000 per year I can make £16,000 in less than an hour now within the businesses that I have. So, if you look at it from that perspective, it’s understanding not just profession, which is what you talked about in your career. But it’s also understanding your relationship with money, because in order to attract money into your life, there are several things that have to come into place. Now can I make a suggestion on the time that we’ve got on this podcast, we cover three areas. If that’s okay with you? Can I just list them out what I think we should cover Harms?

HARMS:
Okay yes.

RO:
So, what I’d like to cover with you whilst we are on this call is, money beliefs. So, what are people’s beliefs around money, without having those correct everything else goes all over the place and so, what I’ve learned just from this conversation with you briefly at the start of your journey was, your belief was if you got a good career you would generate a lot of money. Without thinking about the diversity of that, it was just get a good career and get a good salary. Am I correct? Was that fundamentally one of your beliefs?

HARMS:
That was fundamentally yes, yes.

RO:
Okay. So, one of the areas we are going to cover will be money beliefs. Another area is money management. So once and I’ll come back and ask you this question once we get into the flow is, what money management systems do people have in place in order for them to not just earn the money, manage the money, but then make the money grow for them. Because it is not how hard you work, it is how hard your money works for you. I think that’s probably something you don’t even consider back at 19 years of age, would that be true?

HARMS:
I’ll talk about my systems later because I had a feeling that was going to be one of the topics you’ll talk about. So, I’ll talk about what my systems were previously in the past and what I noticed with some of the people around me and what their systems were. As an example of how I used to treat money, maybe 10 years ago now.

RO:
Okay this is fascinating. And then the last thing I think that I want to tackle before we finish this is, attracting more money. So how can we attract more money into our lives outside of our primary career, or where we are putting most of our time, i.e. a job for most people. And then it would be great to finish off with some key actions and maybe you and I can choose an action from what we talked about. So, can I kick off with money beliefs first?

HARMS:
Yes, I think that’s a great place to start, because just from a personal point of view, once my money beliefs shifted then we started to experience the sort of income levels, which I never, if you told me I could be earning this 10 years ago, I would have said no way. As an engineer you can’t earn that as an engineer. So, I think beliefs is a great place to start.

RO:
Yeah exactly. If you think about it from your property business alone, you and your wife put yourself into a position in a small number of years to cover your expenses and to be able to not have to work for a whole lifetime, if you choose to. Albeit you’ve created other businesses, so there’s no way at 19 you would have had even that idea in your mind, unless somebody had placed that early. The only seed that gets placed is the belief that you need to get a good career.

HARMS:
It makes total sense Ro. Because if we talk about beliefs in terms of what I believe my scope and how much I could attain as a person, and what the meanings were that I attached money to. They were set by parents, family, and then the group of people around me in my circle, so that was the extreme of what I understood money to be. So, I think it’s a great place to start and by all means let’s kick-off. Let’s talk about beliefs and money.

RO:
Right, so as you’re listening to this right now, if you’ve got a pen, one of the things to appreciate is that every single human being has a template around any part of our lives. Whether it’s money, health, relationships, business, career. So, each of us will have a money template, now that template the same way you might want to draw a picture several times, you can make little plastic or wooden template and draw it again, repeat it again and again. Once that template is shaped, usually in the first five, six, seven, eight years and then along our journey into our teens into early 20s, a significant emotional event, an observation that we heard, or something we heard a lot of times from a parent or somebody else. It becomes part of our template. We get shaped, and that’s what we believe about money. So, on the basis that every human being has as a single template or several smaller templates around money. How we identify what those templates are is, each template represents a belief. And what I mean by that is, for example, money doesn’t grow on trees. You’ve probably heard that, or you heard somebody say that. Is that something you heard at some point in your youth, either from family or friends Harms?

HARMS:
100%. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Amongst a whole bunch of other phrases such as, you have to work hard to get money, you have to work even harder, add up overtime, do extra hours, work bank holidays. That is how you accumulate more money.

RO:
Right so, study hard. Be grateful that you’re in a good career. Money is the root of all evil, which again is a misquote, a biblical misquote. I’m not a business person, only rich people can make more money. These are all mini beliefs, they’re also templates. So, if money doesn’t grow on trees becomes written into your psyche, it’s like a shape. If you do a template, like my daughter she wants to do a picture of a cat 10 times over. You draw the template out she can just, it’s like a stencil. You keep going over and over it again. And the thing is the more times that belief, that stencil is drawn over, if you took a stencil on a piece of paper and you just kept going over it again, again and again. Then you removed it, the piece of paper would be absolutely embossed with it, you could not remove it, and that’s what happens to the psyche. Our belief systems about money if they are drilled in and literally embedded at a young age, every single behaviour after that when we are 10,15, 20, 25, 30, my age 53. If you have not changed that template, that stencilled embossed belief that’s in your unconscious. If you haven’t changed it whenever you’re faced with a situation where you need to draw on a belief and that belief comes out, it might limit your possibilities. Does this makes sense Harms? Now I know it makes sense to you from the perspective of you’ve been through this process with me now, but when you’ve seen this in other people, have you witnessed other people literally giving you resistance, younger people, that you might have worked with. Because you can already see that they’ve got this stencil that they cannot change or they didn’t know that they could change.

HARMS:
Yeah, that makes total sense Ro. And it’s not even the younger people, it’s also people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, even 60s and 70s. And when you explain it to them like that. It’s like you just see them internalising, and you see the lightbulb go off, thinking damn if somebody just showed me a different template, I could’ve just worked towards that. But this is all I knew, and it’s when they realise, that’s all I knew, because that’s all I was ever told, and then they just got busy and head down in their career, they never took a step back to have this conversation about money. And then they could readdress their template. So yes, it’s seen so often to the point where, and a good indicator I found is when somebody is uncomfortable talking about money or they rarely even speak about money that’s an instant indicator that their template is slightly skewed, and that’s when really they are the people that need to talk about it the most.

RO:
Right so, even at that point there, this could be a conversation for an hour just on that one point you’ve made there. And somebody listening to this might go, “that’s not true, no, the only reason I don’t really want to talk about money is because I don’t necessarily want to talk about how much I earn, or how little I earn.” Well there you go, there is a limiting belief. Why should you feel uncomfortable about that? “Oh well because I was taught that it’s not healthy or it’s not socially acceptable to talk about how much you earn.” There is another belief that society has put upon you. So, that’s not to say you go around telling everybody how much you earn, but when it comes to a personal conversation where you are trying to break through and get to another level. We have to be very honest, it’s okay to say actually, I’d like to earn more money because I’d like to give money to charity, I’d like to being to help my kids, I’d like to travel more, I’d like to be able to do more for the world. If I earn more money, I could do that. So, thinking small living small, earning small amounts of money does not necessarily help the bigger cause. If you’ve got a vision to do something amazing in the world and that involves money and giving money away, and the only way to do that is to generate more money and that’s the dilemma that people get into. So, even if they’re defensive, like you say to start with, it’s a definite sign that they’ve got some challenges with their beliefs around money. I mean a classic example my mum. As you talked about there in the 60s, my mum is in her 70s. She grew up during the war period when everything was rationed, so to her money is like this sacred thing, and the concept of entrepreneurialism and earning more money, etc most people would just survive from that era. They just want to survive, they store their food, there’s tins of, you might have seen this in older people generations. But they had tins of food that is well out of date, it has been sat there on the shelf. Because when I was little, we just had to eat everything we had, and we didn’t let anything go. So, I go to my mum’s house, jokes aside sometime when I see a tin of food there, I’m like oh my god that’s like a year out of date. Have you ever seen this?

HARMS:
I’ve seen this and my parents listening, they’ll be having a chuckle themselves.

RO:
That generation, it’s just don’t waste and that’s true. Unfortunately though, with that comes a sense of security, locking everything down, protecting everything, and of course, that means not investing your money or your time into something to grow. And there’s the dichotomy here is that the confusion is, I want to grow, I can see my kids are growing, I’m in my 50s and 60s now, but I was always taught to be protected and safe and my beliefs are, you’ve got to cover and protect everything. Well how can you grow if you’re not prepared to invest part of you, part of your time and part of your money into something. So, it’s a major subject, I mean this could be the whole subject in its own just this one thing about people coming from a place of scarcity. But let me just expand a little bit on some questions that the listeners can actually have a think about. So, one of the questions Harms is this, maybe if you’re listening to this you can write it down.

What did you hear?
What did you see and hear?

And Harms has actually alluded to some of those points already. So, when you were growing up,

What did you see your parents do?
Your uncle and aunts, people around you, or what did you hear them say?

And we’ve alluded to some typical beliefs there. So, for example I was working with a couple not so long ago where they were wanting to start a business, but they’d seen their parents start a business and both their parents had argued. Had fallouts over it, she wants to invest more money into the business, the husband didn’t. The husband was like, “we’ve got to stay safe we shouldn’t invest any more money into the business.” It created a massive rift and the relationship broke up. So, the couple I was talking to were afraid to start their own business because what if we get into a divorce just like my parents did. So, the belief from when they were seven and eight years of age was based on the fact that, starting a business can destroy a relationship. Think about that fundamentally, that’s massive. So, what did you see and hear, that could have left a negative seed of doubt or planted some fear in you around money? Is there anything you personally want to observable or add to that Harminder?

RO:
Okay, so added to that is first of all, just catalogue it. Grab it, just go back to the conversations that took place around money, money doesn’t grow on trees, only rich people can do this, don’t be silly enough to do that because you’re in a career as an engineer, how on earth can you start other businesses? You might have heard all sorts of things, all associated with making money or managing your money.

Second question is, how did that shape your beliefs?

So, having now written down what you believe you saw or heard. Now reflect back honestly and say, oh my gosh actually if I think about it when certain things come up, I can almost hear my dad’s voice or my mum’s voice, or my parent’s arguing, my auntie or uncle, or whatever it is. And that’s affecting the way I act today because 90% of our decisions that we make around money, are influenced by what we observed around us when we were growing up. Because you and me Harminder and although I’m 20,30 years older than you, we both started with a blank canvas. You know when little Ro with his hair and his diapers started to grow up, walking, no hair now, I had no hair back then. I was a blank canvas. I knew nothing about money. You didn’t, you didn’t have a beard. I don’t think you were born with that beard that you’ve got today, maybe you were, I don’t know.

HARMS:
I had a few whiskers.

RO:
At the end of the day, neither you, myself, your parents or our grandparents had any beliefs around money. Those beliefs were put upon us, or we observed them from somebody else. Or we define those beliefs further along the line by our own experiences with money. So, my question is,

What did you see and hear, question number one?

And then how did that shape you?
How did that shape your beliefs today as a grown person?

HARMS:
I think those are two fantastic questions Ro, and like I said we’ll put those in the show notes. And I was just internalising then as you were speaking about the scenarios and my money beliefs even into my 20s, 50s and even sometimes now in my 30s, I find myself checking in and my question now is slightly more advanced.

And I say to myself, is that me? Is that genuinely me thinking that about this money decision I’m about to make, or has that come from an external force?

And now it is also an external force, not from the past in terms of parents, friends, uncles, aunties, and grandparents treated money, and the stories they associate with money. But also, now from a different level of expertise so, I may have a mentor or coach who spoke about the way they manage money in their business, and I have to question am I taking on their belief? Am I taking on my parent’s beliefs? I have to make an independent decision now based on all these great things I’ve learned, because these are all good learnings, but you have to identify, I have to identify that for myself.

Is this a limiting belief around money or is this me now saying actually, I’m comfortable making this decision because why should I be held back by somebody else’s opinion on money from about 15, 16 years ago? So, I now check in with myself, but that will come naturally over time.

RO:
Well it will if somebody listening to this is staying plugged into Seekardo as an example, because of the nature of the style of this conversation that happens, I’ll naturally coach, and you’ll coach. And you get to a point with emotional development and self-awareness, this is self-awareness coaching, so you become now reflective on your own thoughts. You self-coach coach to a certain level and that’s what you’re talking about there, it’s the minute you become aware of something, if you ask the right question behind it, you can even come up with the correct answer. A powerful question usually leads to powerful answer, so that’s a really interesting that you’ve got to this stage already at such a young age. Most people don’t get there, they just haven’t got the awareness of that so hats off to you.

HARMS:
Thank you, that’s kind. But it links back to point number one of this podcast, which is what is your belief around money, and then having the confidence to be coached and mentored and actually work on that belief. Because sometimes, yes, it can be uncomfortable because you’re changing the way you thought something was for the last 15, 16, 17 years, now you’ve changed, shifted from that belief to a completely different belief. And that can be tough, it can be uncomfortable.

RO:
So, I think just to wrap up with two more quick ones to give them something to go away with today is, question number three then that it,

What negative feelings or beliefs do you have associated with money?

That may be different to the previous question, this is now a very specific question. Whenever you think about going and spending money, or an experience you’ve had just recently where you’ve spent money, spent too much money, or you haven’t spent enough on something, or you have to go and invest in something.

Or you have to give somebody money, what negative feelings do you have?
Do you find yourself resisting doing that?
Do you find yourself sat at a table with friends and there’s a dinner and you’re thinking, how are we going to pay for this?
Do we split the bill; do I take the bill?
I think they should take the bill. What happens when a letter comes in the post and you open it up and it’s a bank statement, what negative beliefs do you have associated with that? Or if you get a bill in the post that you weren’t expected to be so high.

Start thinking about any time you have a slightly negative feeling around money. Make a note of it. And start to ask powerful questions around that.

What’s it linked to?
Is it shaped back to the past?
There’s one last question I’ve added to this, but for now I just want people to be aware of when they start to notice a negative feeling coming up.

RO:
And actually, just to wrap it up with the last question then. So, that the previous question was, what negative feelings or beliefs do you have associated with money or have in the past?

And the last part of the question then is, the last question to this process is, how have these beliefs affected the decisions that you made?

Which I’ve just illustrated from my own personal perspective. How have they? And you go actually, I believe this is and I believe this, and oh my gosh in believing that, I said no to that opportunity. I said no to that because I was afraid, I’d take the money out of the bank account and take a risk. I said yes to that, because I tend to spend a lot of money and I thought screw it, I’ll just go for it, but I didn’t really think it through. So, your beliefs will definitely have affected certain decisions.

What have you lost out on as a result of possible negative beliefs around money?
What opportunities have you let slip by?
What things haven’t you aspired to do because you’re just dumbing your dreams down, because you’ve got this fear of losing money?

I mean Harminder you talked about saving money, so I guess your head was just purely down really, just saving, saving, saving, without necessarily a big vision into the future, it was just to stay safe at the moment.

HARMS:
Yes, and I think you’ve just nailed it there, stay safe. So, if I got a pot of cash, I felt like I was safe. When you actually dive into it from a financial sense, it’s actually not safe at all really, so if you’ve got a cash pot at home it’s not actually that safe. And it won’t actually last you that long. If you say for example, you lost your job, you’ll fairly quickly burn through that because, there’s living expenses, travel, things like that. For some reason, that was a financial safety buffer and I felt safe having had that in the bank account.

But when you think about it as in, I’m just one person with one set of beliefs, whereas, I’m not saying this would’ve been your case Ro, but if you had spent everything in your bank account on experiences, we are both people living different lives, we are both okay, we are both alive. At the end of the day we are both alive, and still living, but different spending habits, but both still okay. And I think that’s something to realise as well. There’s lots of different ways to do this, but we are still going to be okay, but the first step is just understanding why you’re behaving like that. That’s so big, that self-awareness that you mentioned earlier.

RO:
And I think there’s a very good point. This is not about making a judgement, it’s about making an observation. We are coaching ourselves, being observational. I’m going to throw a provocative comment on what you’ve just said there, and I think you’ve made a very good point. And I’m going to try even simplify this down to two things.

Do you want to survive, or do you want to thrive?

And as far as I’m concerned, surviving is the okay bit, I’m okay, I’m surviving. But if you’re listening to this and you’re like, fuck this I want to thrive, in order to thrive the old beliefs that have been limiting your expansion as a human being financially need to go.

And a whole new set of beliefs which is a completely different podcast altogether, about life and money need to come into play. And this is not me trying to be bullying by the way, I’m saying it but I’m bullying myself on a regular basis to remind myself in positive ways, it’s like positive bullying.

I’m like Ro, kick yourself up the arse, remember to do this, remember you’ve got to put some money aside here,

what about yours kids, have your kids learned the money management system?

I mean I’m doing that at the moment with my eldest daughter, she is 10. Has she got a money management system in place?
What are her beliefs around money?

If we don’t self-reflect and kick ourselves up the arse before you know it, everything is okay. The problem with being okay for too long is people get bored they get sick of it, they get frustrated and that’s why the midlife crisis has moved down from the 40s into the 30s. I find, the people my age in their 50’s listening to this right now, you’re probably at the stage where you’re thinking, you know what fuck this. I do want more, I do want to have more money, I do want to enjoy, my kids are at university now, but I still don’t have enough in the pot here. If you’re 30, 35 years of age, you might have a pot of money right now, but it will not last you another 30 years. Something has to change. Your money has to expand and grow beyond your physical means and that’s done through vehicles, it’s through management systems, it’s through attracting more into your life, but it starts with the fundamentals of your beliefs right.

You have to. It’s the roots of everything.

HARMS:
I think that is a fantastic point. And with midlife crisis comes a large part of what you’ve saved just gets blown on something. You constantly hear about this; it gets blown on a car. It gets blown on a massive holiday. And a large percentage of everything that they’ve saved, because they got bored and frustrated and maybe even questioned why on earth have I spent all this time, saying this money, I’m now going to reward myself after 20,30 years. And it’s coming sooner, sooner, and sooner. But what I want to add on the back of what Ro has just said, because it is very challenging and there’s a lot of truth in that.

What I wanted to say is, now the thing to be aware of is, be careful not to chase money for the wrong reason. I think it’s important we put that warning out there because, the contrast of this is, okay well I don’t want to be okay, so now I’m going to search for how to make lots of money and I’m going to go chasing money. And you’ll chase money doing something you’re not passionate about, because you’re purely chasing the money, and nine times out of 10, it’s not going to work. Because you’ve done it for the wrong reason, you’ve done it for the riches.

RO:
I think you’re spot on and maybe to wrap up the podcast in a bit, we could just touch on that, the attractions. Because I think attraction is a whole different podcast altogether. But I did want to touch it before we finish because you’ve raised a very good point here, because if pursuit of money is the main focus, this is where the get rich quick scheme type businesses will then, they’re like vultures that prey on people that desperate to suddenly generate more money. That’s not the way to do it either. So, I think you’ve raised a very good point there.
HARMS:
Yeah, and that’s just us saying, just a warning off the back of that, there is a sensible way to do this and I think that takes us onto the second part of the podcast where Ro you’re going to talk to us about money systems, and how you manage money.

RO:
Yeah, Harms. Okay so, money management. Now bear in mind the importance of this podcast and we covered there which is beliefs. The next two, I’m going to go briefly through these money managements. The last one attraction.

So, if you’re listening to this right now and you’re like I was when I was in my youth, and even a lot of people I meet today, 40,45, 50, 55, 60 years of age they still do the same thing. They earn money and they spend money, a little bit put aside for holidays possibly, otherwise it’s payed for on credit cards. And that’s a typical model.

People do not have a system, and I know that because I was really bad at this. I literally would earn money and spend it. That was it. So, the system that I typically use today has several layers to it, but I’m just going to headline them with you if that’s okay Harminder? Because of time and it could be something that we can come back and reflect on in a future podcast, if you want to bring this up, and I think it’s a provocative subject. So, we could cover it separately. But if everyone has their pens out, can I just list them out briefly Harminder so everyone’s got an idea.

HARMS:
That would be fantastic, and just to put some context behind this, I think it’s useful that we have this as a separate podcast. Because can go very deep into this, because I use your system now. But I can also share with them in a few moments, the system I used to use, and it might overwhelm the listeners. Because the first part was incredible so far.

RO:
Okay, so, I’ve just remembered that the conventional model is you earn money, you pay your bills and then whatever is left you spend on some stuff and that’s in, or you maybe go on holiday a year. And in 15,20 years later you’re thinking what the hell have I been doing for the last 15,20 years?

So, I’m going to give you a system that works very well and you might want to consider this as you move forward. Even if you don’t do the details right now. So, the first one is this, a percentage of your money needs to go towards your basic living costs. This is what you’re paying your fundamental bills with i.e. food, your heating, your gas bills, your house rent, or mortgage, and anything you need to get by on to survive. Your living costs that’s it, no bells and whistles.

No cable TV, no flashy this and flashy that. It’s just your basic living expenses. That’s one category of spending in your household.

The second category of spending would be your money that you spend on fun, so this is where you treat yourself to things. This is what I did a lot, I would save it up to spend it straightaway. So, these would be something every single month that you spend yourself on, you treat yourself to something, whether it’s a toy i.e. gadget for a bloke, and for a lady it could be something completely different. For me personally, I’m a bit of a gadget person. Whether it is going out and treating yourself to an experience that would be the fun side of your money and what I’m saying here is, if you can imagine a big pot money coming in every single month, you’ve got to allocate a percentage of that to each of these categories. If you really want to have a system behind it.

The next one is savings. Now this is savings for short-term and for the long term, so this is money that you put aside, this is what you seem to have done a lot of in the early years Harminder.

HARMS:
Yeah, so typically, I was 100% a saver. I had pot number one. And then I had pot number three, which you just mentioned which is savings. What I was terrible at was the reward. I won’t go too deep into it, but I just did not reward myself. I would spend ad hoc, but it wasn’t a conscious decision.

RO:
So, the idea of going out and treating, the fun money by the way is guilt free money so you already had a sense of guilt attached to that. If you go spend something on yourself, Harminder like I feel guilty because I’m taking it out of my savings pot, is that right?

HARMS:
That’s correct. Whereas if I had this system back then, which said maybe a certain percentage, I wanted to buy X, say for example an 18 year old, the things you’re interested in are a brand-new jacket. I wanted a brand new winter jacket it’s a bit more expensive than the stuff that’s out there, if I was conscious about this. I should have said right once my fun money account may be hit £100, I’ll go buy this winter jacket. Whereas I did not do that. I will get to the £100 and say, no I don’t need that, I’ll just keep on saving.

RO:
So, for me it was what am I saving for? I’m not going to live past 40, I’m just going to have a massive fun bucket. And that fun bucket which is all the money that went into there was spent.

If you paint a picture or you’re doing a diagram on this. If you imagine this huge vat of this fresh spring water, you’re feeding your life every single month. So, one little valve opens up to cover your living costs. Another valve opens up to cover your fun money. Another valve opens up to cover your savings and long-term savings for the future as well.

So, the vat of water which is lovely, life-giving water is slowly going down but in a certain percentage. At the end of the month, that certain percentage you should’ve allocated to each of these different areas. That way you’re always going to have the same amount left or not left in the pot, depending on how you allocate the money. So, you’ve got savings, you’ve got living, you’ve got play money.

Another area I would strongly recommend is investments into the future. So, this is separate to savings. This is putting money into investments; this is your golden egg if you like. Whether this is property, whether it’s the stock market, whether you’re investing into a business.

But a percentage of what you earn goes into that particular area that allows you to grow your wealth. Remember you’ve spent some of it, you’ve lived off some of it, you’ve saved some for security, and now we are actually getting some to grow for us.

The other two I would say you might want to consider, one is charity, giving money unconditionally to a charity, a small percentage of what you own goes to that one pot. And that can be any charity you choose that you’re passionate about. Don’t just give it for the sake of it. That’s what I did in the early days, I was like right I’ve got to find a charity. No, that’s not about got to find a charity, I made that fundamental mistakes. Somebody educated me on this and said find a charity you love. For me it’s kids.

So, what are you passionate about that when you give the money that’s going to help them? So, it’s a different association with the money.

And then the last one is debt. It may be that you’re listening to this and a certain amount of money per month has to go to pay off your debt, that is not the same as saving. This is different, clearing down debt. Now there is anything between 4 to 7 different allocations of money, I’ve gone through five or six there to start with, but Harminder does that make sense? I know generally your principles are now very similar to this. But how does that differ from where you were at the start?

RO:
A really good question Ro. That’s a fantastic system for anybody listening. How that differentiates from what I used to do was, my systems was this.

I would earn the money and that would go to one pot. Then I would take out a certain percentage quite, quite a chunky because when I was young I used to live at home with mum and dad. So, I was fortunate enough that I didn’t have lots overheads, so I would then take a certain percentage and that would go into a savings pot and that was it.

That was my system. The savings pot had no other allocation. It was just there to stockpile, stockpile, stockpile. And that was a savings pot which was just building with no actual intention of anything to do with that money, it was just a safety buffer. So, that was my system. But I think that is just one pot really, or two pots, living and savings that was it. That was my system compared to what I do now, which is the exact system that you talk about and I actually learned from you many years ago now, so I implement that system.

The one thing I currently don’t do is, and this is a message, just so to say, it’s okay to be flexible with this. So, we don’t actually allocate finances towards charity causes we are exploring and giving our time to the charity causes instead of the money. That’s where we are currently in our life, and again it’s okay to be flexible with this. If you’ve got more time in a certain area, you can give the time. So, that’s how we now, it’s a stark contrast, massive, massive contrast, it does require a sort of systemised approach, discipline and a systemised approach.

You hit the nail on the head there with discipline because, it has to be something, you’re not going to gain the results of this in month one, month two, month three. You’re going to see this 12 months down the line when you look at your finances at the end of the year, and you’re like, wow that’s pretty cool. I’ve got £1000 here, I’ve got £2000 here, got £300 here, and you’re like, that’s pretty impressive.

RO:
And you’ve got the new leather jacket.

HARMS:
And you’ve reward yourself sensibly. You’ve gone and experienced things. I get a message for those listening at home, I sometimes get jealous because I get a message from Ro and says, I’m looking at this gadget, and it’s normally the top of the range drone, camera, or something for his Tesla. And I’m like, ah okay, I love that, this is
Amazing. But for me it’s great, it’s an inspiration for me to say, right okay, that’s in terms of money, so talking about money beliefs, it’s I need to get to a stage where I’m adding enough value to the market to earn enough to then go and reward myself with these sorts of gadgets.

RO:
And feel good about it and not feel guilty about it.

HARMS:
And not feel guilty about it, because there’s a certain pot allocated to treat myself, to reward myself based on that. Same with savings. Same with, if you’ve got a business, you have to have a certain percentage put aside as a buffer. Those who do property know they should have a buffer to support their property business, and I know we are going in to the how-to there, but that’s not the point of this because we are going to do a separate podcast, but you can see the difference. So, the way I’m talking now is very different to when you probably met me five years ago.

RO:
Yeah, agreed. And I think just to add to this, don’t be overwhelmed by this list, it’s me giving you at this stage an awareness. All I want you to do is, as you’re listening to be aware of where your money is going. And I might make that a part of the homework actually, between myself and Harminder we need to tackle that because, I think the key thing here is that you start to be self-reflective on how your money is being managed. And that’s the way you start to notice where it’s going, where it shouldn’t go, and you can start to rein it in and reallocate those funds to a more purposeful direction.

HARMS:
Totally agree Ro. So, on that note, you said there’s going to be a third part which is attraction. And I’m quite curious to see how you’re going to explore this topic, because I know this is another hour-long length podcast, so I’m interested to see how you’re going to shorten this. Over to you on attraction.

RO:
Okay I am going to keep it brief and I’m just simply going to ask everyone if you could write the following sentence down,

you will only attract to you that which you believe wholeheartedly you can attract.

So, let me say that again. You will only attract that to you which you believe wholeheartedly that you can attract and that you intend to attract and that you believe you deserve to attract.

So, there’s these three elements to it. It’s like opening up these valves in a dam, allowing the water to come through from the reservoir through the dam and out to irrigate the fields below, and to keep people vegetables fed with water.

So, the first belief, that the first valve is you believe that you can attract money, that’s really important.

Secondly, you believe that you deserve to attract money, and then wrapped around that is this third element, which is the intention, you have a pure intention to attract more money into your life. It’s coming from nowhere than a source of purity, it’s not for greed, it’s not to do anything negative with. It has to have a pure intention.

And if you put those three things together, those three valves. You can open up two valves in a dam and still not feed and irrigate the water, and the fields below. It’s only when the third valve is open, can we truly actually get the water flowing. In other words, the flow of money, this is a metaphor, into our lives. So, when I’ve worked with people often what happens is, they do believe that they can attract money, so they’ve got those right. But they may not have a total belief in themselves, does that make sense Harms?

So, they believe they can attract money, but they don’t have a total belief in themselves, and they may not believe they have a vehicle to attract money. So, one little valve blockage can stop the whole of the flow of the water.

HARMS:
That makes total sense. And actually, that last valve, I’ve genuinely not heard that before. I personally approach money from a place of purity anyway. However, I’ve not heard it described like that, so that’s fascinating. Because I agree if you put the intention out there for greed or I want money because of envy, envy is another terrible human sometimes thing we have within us which is I want money because that person has it.

I want what they’ve got because of jealousy and envy. These are impurities and if we can take those, strip it out and say, okay let me give an example of pure reason, a pure reason is, I want my family to have the best life I can possibly give them and still have surplus to give to charity that I’m really passionate about, or that has affected a certain family member of mine, so I want to give charity to support them. So, that’s somebody coming from a place of purity and a place of giving and saying, I want more, I want more, because it’s not for me. I think this is a real challenge people have with the negative belief around business people or even property landlords.

Some people believe that the money is purely for them, that goes into their own pocket and that gets locked away. When actually, no, money is a flow. And it will flow to different parts and if you have a management system like Dr Ro spoke about in the second part of this podcast, you will understand that actually, no, as a business owner the money belongs to the company. And then part of that money will flow to the owner of the company. There’s a lot of elements of that money flow, and a part of that will be charity.

RO:
Just to jump in and add there so, you’ve made a good point and you’ve definitely got a pure intention, I know that as a person. So, for anyone listening to this, if you have a pure intention to attract more money, that has to come from a place of giving value.

So, if that intention involves giving value to other people, offering a great service, etc, again, this another podcast for business. That’s the first part.

The second thing is, that you believe that you can attract money, i.e. it’s looking at all the beliefs that you have around your ability to attract money to you that comes down to things like,

I do believe I can do it because I can start property business.
I do believe I can do it because I can trade the stock market.
I do believe I can do it and start an internet business.
I do believe I can do it because I can start a web-based social media company, or whatever it is.

So, that’s about your belief that you can do it. So, there’s a whole set of beliefs just around that. Then there’s the final element, which is the belief that I deserve it, and this is where a lot of people have an issue, because something has gone on in the past with where, they don’t feel worthy.

You were at an event with me recently Harminder, where a lady literally melted down in the audience when I started to approach her on her beliefs about money. She even brought her hands up to her face and started to cover herself up because she had all these blocks, and she wanted to protect herself from all these little voices in their head that were telling her, she doesn’t necessarily believe that she deserves to earn more money.

And so we can have the first two, the intention and the belief that we can, we’ve got a great vehicle, oh my gosh why is it I’ve been in property now for the last two years but I just don’t seem to be able to make any money from this?

That’s because fundamentally the third valve is that you don’t deserve you earn it. But I thought I did?

Well let’s ask some questions about that. And all of a sudden they realise there’s the block. So, we have to clear all three of those. And by doing that you get alignment with pure intention of the universe, which is bringing money to us in this case.

HARMS:
Yeah, and you’ll have to take our word for it until you start it yourself. It will come, it will come.

RO:
It’s vibrational harmony.

HARMS:
It is. And it’s how you approach it, so I mean, that’s a fantastic summary on attraction. I think we can talk about that for a very long time, so I think the next natural place to go now with this is, an action point and homework for the Seekardo podcast listeners at home, and maybe you can give them a few action points on this and I’ll give them a few action points from my perspective.

RO:
Yeah, I think I’ll just give one really, and it’s going back to the subject of beliefs. I think the main exercise I would encourage you to do is simply write this down,

Number one, why do you believe that you can create more wealth, more money in your life?
Why do believe that?

So, it’s a simple, simple question.

Why do you believe it? Just write down whatever you believe about why you know; you can create more money. And it could be to do with, I believe I can create money because I have an amazing skill set, I have tools that I know I can offer to the world. I believe I can generate more money because I’ve been in this industry, I’ve been in it for the last 30 years and I can monetise that by becoming a consultant. I believe I can generate money because I can start a property business.

Whatever it is. But I want you to write down all your key beliefs about why you believe that you can generate more money. But separate to that and the

Second question is, why do you believe you deserve to earn more money?

And that’s really important, so, it could be to do with the fact that you deserve it because you’ve worked hard all these years and you want to generate more money to have your family. Could be to help charities, it could be because you would like to travel more, and that you believe you deserve more money because you can do good with it.

So, if you can write down six strong reasons why you deserve more money, that will start to build the beliefs in you about how you can attract more money into your life. And underlining all of this is, as Harminder said is, don’t go chasing the money. That’s a conversation for another day, or another podcast, but don’t be obsessed with the money, it’s about building a strong set of beliefs that underpin how you go building that wealth for yourself. That’s all I want to leave you with.

HARMS:
I think that’s a great action, that keep somebody busy for quite a while, especially the third question, which is about deserving money. I think we will get some feedback on that and hopefully we can help future listeners on almost coaching them through that exercise, because it is going to be challenging, especially if it’s the first time you’re approaching this exercise. I think it took me maybe about 3 to 4 rounds of working through that process, for me to finally realise where all my money beliefs had come from. Every single one, I could pinpoint it to a parent, I could pinpoint it to a family member, to a celebrity, to a movie I watched and it all generally comes through childhood, but I could pinpoint all those beliefs. And I can promise you it’s a massive relief once you realise they are not your beliefs, they are somebody else’s, you’ve just been holding onto them for quite a long time. So yes, definitely work through those.

The action point I have which links to Dr Ro’s money management system which is, we won’t go into the detail of it because I think that’s too much for this step.

I think the main part to focus on is just to be aware of where your money is going at the end of every month, and what pot is it being allocated to?

So, you’ve got the six pots to work with now. The first thing to do is at the end of the month have a look at your finances and say which pots did money get allocated to?

Typically it may be, living costs, spending and savings pot. That will probably be the typical pots at the moment, but then have a look and what I’ll say is take one of the pots Dr Ro spoke about. Maybe it’s the fun pot. Maybe it’s the investment pot, and just open another pot and put something there to start with. And we will hopefully cover this in more detail in the future on exactly what to do, but at this stage it’s purely about awareness, what pots are being used at the moment. That’s the action point for myself.

RO:
Absolutely. If think that’s great Harminder. There’s a left brain and a right brain exercise here, one is a more logical one, as you’ve just gone through there, and then the beliefs is more about emotion, the right brain is having a really deep look at our beliefs as well. Thank you for inviting me on and I am looking forward to picking the subject up again actually on one of our future podcasts.

HARMS:
That’s an absolute pleasure Ro. And I’m glad I approached you with this question. Just to summarise, we covered money beliefs. We covered money management systems and we’ve even spoken about attracting money into your life. So, even if you take that description, rewind the podcast take that description Ro gave you about attracting money, that will start to unlock some amazing things in your life. So, on that note, that is myself and Dr Ro signing out. Don’t forget to check out the show notes at growth tribes.com/podcast, where we will have the show notes, we will have all the useful things we spoke about within this podcast. Especially the coaching questions they have been very popular, so just check us out, check us out on the website. And that is me and Dr Ro signing out today’s episode of Seekardo podcast.