by Michael Holland     

Building functional families requires work, dedication and investment of time.  And it’s the latter one that trips up most men as they try to manage the tension between home and work.  Men rationalize that the time we invest at work is for the benefit of our families to a point that we can become obsessed with moving forward and up.  We spend most of our prime time during the week at work, doing work and/or thinking about work.

Men can get caught up with constantly moving the goal line regarding our finances.  Imagine if you were playing in a football league over a number of years and as you became a better, stronger athlete allowing you to run faster, you kept moving the goal line further and further away.  Then you train longer and harder to get faster only to move the goal line again as you improve.

We do the same thing with our financial goals in the magical spreadsheets that document our plans for our financial futures.  We create our goals for generating wealth to be prepared for life and pay for some of our kids’ college and to begin preparing for retirement.  There’s a magical financial freedom number that we generate.  Then as we get raises, we tinker with the future values of the financial goals raising the bar of what we ‘need’ which in turn drives us to perceive a need to work harder to get more promotions and more raises to reach the new goal.

We should challenge ourselves as men to answer the question:  What if we all used our original financial goal numbers as our current goal for financial achievement?

  • How might we look differently at the world around us?
  • How might we look at our goals and desires and rewards?
  • How might we help others to start college or get a little help over a financial bump in the road?”

We cannot know what tomorrow will bring, so maybe we should slow down and stop chasing the wind.