Money, Family and Business

By understanding the key fundamentals you can significantly reduce stress and gain peace of mind with your money!

In this blog, I’m going to share what I believe are the three key principles for creating peace of mind in a relationship with money and business. 

1. Risk & Reward – Be Clear on Money

One of the key areas that is a big challenge in partnership with regards to personal and business finances, and financial planning, is that each of us is an individual with our own view of risk. 

Entrepreneurs can be less risk-sensitive than maybe their spouses. 

Why is this about making sure that we understand each other’s perspectives on risk? And what does that actually mean? 

So we come back to that piece about standards again – where we say the standard for our risk profile together and our risk profiles individually are this.

For example, we’re not going to put a guarantee over the family home, but we might put a guarantee over a 2nd property we owned – such as a flat. As long as we’re bringing in the right amount of money every month, then you can do that. We agree that we can invest some of the other funds that are in the business. But it’s about establishing a baseline around risk and reward and return.

I believe you need to do that very early on so that you can set the communication levels in a way that you actually both understand where the other is coming from. 

2. Return on Investment – It’s More Than Money

This is NOT just a financial return! In many ways, it’s about what do we, as partners and as a family, receive in return for the money and time we invest? 

For example, Netflix is a cost. But, if your children and you, as a family, are enjoying that time – it’s an investment. However, it’s a different mindset to being where we are spending this money in the same way as to where we spend our time. What we’re talking about is:

• What kind of return are we getting? and
• Are we clear about what each of us views as a viable return on that investment?

As business owners, we can think: if I’m spending 12 hours a day trying to build my business and I’m making some progress, that’s great! Whereas, we can find our partners are saying: if you spend a couple of hours helping the kids with their homework in the evening, that would – from a family perspective – be a greater return on investment of your time and our time together. 

3. What’s Yours, Mine and Ours

This doesn’t just apply to our personal funds but also applies to the business. 

The business’s funds must be considered when you’re looking at this:

• What is yours or mine – each, as individuals
• What is ours – as in personal finances as a partnership or family e.g. a joint account or family home

the business, ultimately, is ours and how we then choose to look at in connectivity of our funds.

The analogy I’ve always used is that it’s different pockets in the same pair of trousers!

Yes, they might be individual bank accounts, but ultimately what we’re looking to do is create a golden thread between all that is ours. 

The Solution – Giving You Peace of Mind With Money

What we’ve found that works in our household are the creation of an end to end solution; that is “one version of the truth”, which is transparency. 

It’s how we having communication between my wife and me on the business funds. She can have sight of the business finances – knowing what is where and what goes where. So we can make a decision. 

When we make decisions around what we do with our funds, we now understand what the impact will be:

• What happens in the business happens on us
• What we need from a family perspective
• When change is happening here in the family, what that means for the business

The resulting change is significantly better decision making and financial planning.

So when we’re looking at what we want, especially in our personal lives, when we’ve got opportunities in our personal lives, we understand where we are. It’s brought clarity and given us both a great deal of confidence in what’s going on. And that’s not confidence in the sense that everything’s okay. It’s confidence in the sense of we know where we are and when we’re talking about anything that we’re doing personally or with the businesses, we do it with one set of eyes. We can then have a clear conversation about what the right route forward is for us – irrespective of how challenging that can be.

Over to you!

I’ve always believed that relationships go the way money flows and money can be the biggest challenge in any partnership. 

So having shared the challenges and some of the ideas for solutions to the peace of mind money worry – I’d implore you to take action by reviewing:

• The way you manage your own money 
• How you communicate with your partner about what’s important to them
• Where your perspectives are right now 
• Find a way of working together that enables us to bring our families and business together, especially for our finances.

To help you, I’ve created a linked YouTube video:

https://bit.ly/MasteringMoneyMindset

Please leave a comment – I’d love to hear your struggles and the action you’ve taken to overcome them. Also, let me know if there are other topics you would like me to cover.

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