Ask Christina First: Does your Instinct Drive You Around Money Part 2

By Christina Suter on Jul 19, 2013 at 07:49 AM in Business Issues

Does your Instint Drive You Around Money Part 2

 

Seasonality, the second problem, may take years to figure out. I like to preferably look at 3 years’ to 5 years’ worth of data broken down by month. If you work with a bookkeeper, you can ask them to send you a P&L by month and you just line up the columns. Ask yourself: is there any particular month, holiday, or season that consistently brings you more money or less money? With seasonality, you have to build a reserve that equals the anticipated deficit in the alternative months. Bythe end of the year, you’re able to tell whether your business is making money despite having a distinctly seasonal business.

                                                                                       

Related to the previous topic, I now want to talk about your instinct in relationship to spending because that can also be a stress-producer. Many people have an instinct inside of them that is either a spender or a saver. Regardless of what you are, I’ve discovered that the instinct will, almost subconsciously, spend itself to a certain level. So you might consistently spend into a certain level of debt, or save to a certain level, or spend until your bank account hits exactly or around zero, before you immediately contract from spending. Therefore, the instinct level can go into the negative, zero, or positive.

 

The way to know whether you are a zero versus a negative spender is at the end of every year, you will have a little more debt. That is because someone who doesn’t contract their spending when their account is approaching zero may start using credit cards. They feel like it needs to be brought now even though the cash does not exist. If you’re a zero person, at the end of the 3 years you might find that you keep alternating around a zero point or another number, whether positive or negative. The positive person can also have an upper threshold of how much they can save, which may alternate around a certain number. Few people are truly savers and what they do is that they keep saving consistently. How the instinct works is that you will experience a sense of anxiety and stress when you reach your particular level. Wherever your stress levels are in relationship to the dollar amount is who you are.

Look for Part 3: In next Blog