Stumbling Forward From Financial Setbacks

I too have made my share of poor, bad and just outright dumb financial mistakes. However, rather than lamenting, I learn to quickly take note from my financial mistakes so I don’t make the same or similar mistakes again. It is, after all, just part of my personal financial education cost. The key is make sure the costs incurred are well spent for my personal development, that I continue to educate myself to make better and more informed financial decisions moving forward.

In life, if we stumble, we want to position ourselves to stumble forward towards our ultimate goal(s) and not further away from them. Afterall, it's from our setbacks, challenges, mistakes, etc that we learn to be and do better next time around.

Like myself and some of my clients who made some recent bad investments in growth tech stocks coming out of the pandemic. Yes, we all lost some money and time, but we sure gain a lot of knowledge and experience to make sure we manage risks better, an important area to improve on.

To share Warren Buffett's wisdom, he realizes in his youth that if he continues learning about personal finance and investing, he will ultimately end up very wealthy. Like the great companies he invests in, if he continues to invest more in himself as well, his value will simply grow and compound over time.

If you study Warren Buffett or any other now very financially successful individual and/or large mega cap companies, you will read a lot about their many mistakes, failures, setbacks, missed opportunities, terrible decisions, etc. All of them continue on, to push towards making progress, learning from their "stumbles" to push them towards new opportunities.

Many of my mentors have shared with me, "...it's not about going after perfection, but rather, it's about going after improvements!"

It’s with that same growth and level of thinking mindset that we need to adopt for our own personal finance and when we look forward towards our future. Know that sometimes, the best lessons are the ones we need to learn first-hand to really position ourselves better!

It's hard for us to say we have our personal finance figured out as many of us are not blessed to have a mentor to teach and guide us. It's not about perfection, but rather progress… it’s also about building equity for yourself…and your future. So let's keep learning, sharing, and if needed to, stumbling forward.