I was doing a podcast a little while ago, talking to two fellow opera singers about what I love about personal finance and financial planning and one of the hosts stopped me and said something like:
“Look, I hear what you’re saying, and it sounds great… like it’s this game changing thing… but it can’t be that easy.
(… that’s a horrible misquote of a much more eloquently expressed thought, but it’s been rolling around in my mind for a while now…)
It’s such a trap to write about something you believe is a transformative tool that everyone needs.
Because… everyone doesn’t need it.
That’s right. I said it. Not everyone needs this personal finance/financial planning stuff.
Some people are fine. And if everything is honestly working fine… why micro manage it. It’s working.
And for those of us that aren’t doing fine… it’s not easy. It’s really difficult… but not for the reasons you might think.
Consider this massive oversimplification of my job as an opera singer….
When I’m singing my main goal is to communicate an awesome idea or emotion to another person.
There’s a lot of tools to help this happen: staging, lighting, vocal colour, and of course … the baritone claw. But the whole point it to get that idea from my brain to that other person’s brain.
But I forget that all the time.
I’ll be sitting in a masterclass, or a performance and hear some insane piece of technique. A mezza voce that stops my soul, or a bone shaking resonance and immediately I’m thinking…
“How cool would it be if I could do that?”
So I run to the practise room and obsess about mezza voce for the next 6 months or on one unfortunate period of my life it was trying to master the goat trill.
The problem is that the tool doesn’t matter on it’s own. If it’s not helping my overall purpose of communicating an awesome idea… it’s kind of useless.
And let’s be honest. I’m oversimplifying the purpose of opera by saying it’s ‘just communicating an awesome idea’. It makes it sound like something simple…
… but you know it’s not.
It’s freaking hard.
It takes years of mastery. It’s not a matter of ‘just’ doing anything. It’s a combination of a thousand ever changing factors and tools that match with your deepest, darkest identity.
It’s the same with money.
What if the oversimplified purpose of your life is to take the values that you find really important (family, beautify, justice) and put them into the world.
Money is one of the tools that helps you do that.
The challenge is to connect your money with your values to create a life that you’re happy with.
Now, you might need some tools to help you with that….
But that basic goal is what matters.
Not financial planning.
Not budgets
Not any tool or ideology at all.
There’s a million ways to communicate an awesome idea.
I sing opera. Maybe you paint on canvas, or channel your soul through the words of Shakespeare.
There are also a million ways to make peace with money.
I use financial planning and teach it to others.
But that doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for you.
Want to start getting control of your money? How can I help?
Chris Enns
Financial Planner/Opera Singer
Money never came naturally to me. In fact… I was a bit of a disaster. I remember (very clearly) what it feels like to be ‘financially out of control’.
And honestly, I still get stressed about money… that doesn’t stop… the difference is that now I have the tools to deal with that stress.
And those tools are what’s made it possible for me to build a life full of the things I want: art, creativity, travel, family and more.
If you want to start getting control of your money I’d love to help. You can start with THIS QUIZ, visiting my GETTING STARTED PAGE or by checking out my SERVICES page.
Though in personal finance you may think you’re fine — great even! — without a budget or a plan and be wrong. You might have a balanced budget and a growing savings account without consciously having to touch any of the tools of the trade, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be fine in the end. Because for long-term planning stuff, and even for running out of credit card debt rope, the consequences of not being fine are not seen until years down the road. Which is why we (like climate scientists) need to jump and shout and draw people’s attention to this boring, long-term thing.
As a semi-fictional example, consider a person making scads of money as a consultant. Hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Every year they spend on cool stuff to enjoy their life and also manage to max out their RRSP. Everything’s fine, right? But they just have it sitting there in GICs, and because they make so much more than the RRSP limit, it’s only like 10% of their income. Now retirement looms, no pension, and even though they were “doing fine” without any of the tools, they’re faced with having to pare back their lifestyle spending by a huge amount.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that “goat trill” is a funny name for something.