Description
Tiffany Aliche was a successful pre-school teacher with a healthy nest egg when a recession and advice from a shady advisor put her out of a job and into a huge financial hole. As she began to chart the path to her own financial rescue, the outline of her ten-step formula for attaining both financial security and peace of mind began to take shape. These principles have now helped more than one million women worldwide save and pay off millions in debt, and begin planning for a richer life.
Revealing this practical ten-step process for the first time in its entirety, Get Good with Money introduces the powerful concept of building wealth through financial wholeness: a realistic, achievable, and energizing alternative to get-rich-quick and over-complicated money management systems. With helpful checklists, worksheets, a tool kit of resources, and advanced advice from experts who Tiffany herself relies on (her “Budgetnista Boosters”), Get Good with Money gets crystal clear on the short-term actions that lead to long-term goals, including:
•A simple technique to determine your baseline or “noodle budget,” examine and systemize your expenses, and lay out a plan that allows you to say yes to your dreams.
•An assessment tool that helps you understand whether you have a “don't make enough” problem or a “spend too much” issue—as well as ways to fix both.
•Best practices for saving for a rainy day (aka job loss), a big-ticket item (a house, a trip, a car), and money that can be invested for your future.
•Detailed advice and action steps for taking charge of your credit score, maximizing bill-paying automation, savings and investing, and calculating your life, disability, and property insurance needs.
•Ways to protect your beneficiaries' future, and ensure that your financial wishes will stand the test of time.
An invaluable guide to cultivating good financial habits and making your money work for you, Get Good with Money will help you build a solid foundation for your life (and legacy) that’s rich in every way.
Chapter 1
Before We Begin: Get to Know Financial Wholeness
Seven years after starting my business I was making more money a month than I used to make in a year teaching preschool. I had more than enough to live on and was able to dig myself out of my financial hole. I paid off the $35,000 in credit card debt that I’d accumulated from my run-in with Jack the Thief and the overpriced business course (see the introduction if you want to relive all that with me!), and I also paid off my $52,000 student loans. Once I was debt-free I was able to save almost 70% of my income and paid cash for a car (used, but certified and new to me) and a new house. The house was a foreclosure and therefore seriously discounted from what would have been the market price, but it was still a very big ticket item: $180,000. I was even able to pay off the remaining $120,000 on my parents’ mortgage. By most people’s standards, I was rolling in it!
But even though I was doing so well, I was more scared than I ever had been when I was a teacher and making so much less. In fact, despite making so much less then, I’d never been scared about handling my money at all when I was a teacher. So why was I so obsessed with having zero debt and stashing money away just in case? The short answer is that losing everything during the Great Recession had been traumatic, and I was emotionally scarred. I was living in a state of financial fear.
My own financial fears were obviously brought on by actual events—things that happened (and that I could have handled differently)—and so I felt I had a rational reason to fear financial downfall, but really it was an irrational fear of them happening again. Many people, including my former self, understandably live in financial fear based solely on the possibility of financial disaster. If the global pandemic of 2020 has taught us all anything, it’s that the unknown and unpredictable do happen—jobs and income and stability can disappear due to something simply in the air!
But when you are financially whole in the way I’ll teach you to be, you won’t have to live in fear of all that. You’ll have a plan for each area of your finances so that they are constantly working on your behalf, regardless of where you currently are in life. Financial wholeness has nothing to do with the tax bracket you’re in. Anyone, regardless of their income level or employment status—whether you’re making minimum wage or you’re a millionaire—can and should actively work toward becoming financially whole; its principles are relevant and applicable to all. Financial wholeness doesn’t stabilize just one aspect of your financial life, but all aspects of your financial life. This is why it can help you manage and sometimes even thrive during financially traumatic times.
The True Freedo