Ask Christina First: Does your Instinct Drive You Around Money Part 1

Today’s topic is part of an ongoing series I’ve started on stress. Stress is an amazingly common and very generic experience. That is, the feeling of stress by itself does not necessarily tell you the source of your stress. In this post, I’m specifically focusing on dealing with the emotions caused when revenue is down, a relatively common source of stress.

Revenue can be down in a business because you’re having a bottom-line problem i.e. where at the end of the year your business didn’t make enough money or is in negative cash-flow. Stress from the bottom line may take 3 different forms. First, is that you need more money from your business to take home; hence, the stress is related to the home, and not business, expenses. This is potentially a problem on the personal budget front. Second, is the seasonal flow in your business that you may not be conscious to, or if you are, you don’t know how to reserve for. And third, is that your business actually isn’t making enough money for you to take home, or it has more expenses than income and therefore you’re actually putting money into the business to keep the money flowing. To distinguish between these, you need to be able to access your books.

Regarding the first problem (i.e. needing more money from your business to cover your home expenses), how can you get your home expenses to be less? It’s all in the accounting. Monitor yourself for preferably 6 months to a year. After calculating your home expenses and income, found out which direction it is going. That will tell you whether or not your business is bringing you enough money to support your home lifestyle. However, if you’re putting more money into your business than it’s bringing home to you, then your business expenses outweigh the income. That distinguishes problem one from problem three.

Check in for part 2 next week