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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. And today we have a coaching call, a very timely, focused, poignant, date important topic. See today is Thursday, December 1st, 2016. And today I want you to make a plan for the next year of your life. The next two weeks of December are some of the most valuable planning time, some of the most valuable planning weeks in your annual calendar.

And it took me a few years before I learned this. I always used to get excited about end of the year planning, doing an end of the year review and reviewing my past calendar year and thinking about, okay, what are my dreams for the next calendar year? I would often get excited about that.

And then I would start to think about it towards the end of December. And then I had first week of January, I would sit down and I'd be making my plans, but then I lost my momentum. And roundabout, you know, usually January 1 comes and if it's a weekday, it's the following Monday that you wind up back at work, that you wind up back in front of your desk ready to get to it.

This year, January 1, it looks like it's coming on a Sunday. So Monday is January 2. So it'll happen quicker this year, but often it doesn't happen in that same way. And in years past, that's always resulted in my feeling like I'm running, but I'm running behind because I wasn't ready to go on January 1.

And I learned that in order for me to be ready to go on January 1, I need to start my planning on December 1. December is a very important month for you in terms of your finances because it's still part of the calendar year, of the current calendar year.

There are many year-end things that you can do. You should pay special attention to your year-end investment planning, your year-end tax planning. The tax year for most of you is on a calendar tax year, and so December is the time where you still have time to make any purchases you need to make or make any investment changes.

If you'd like some ideas on end-of-the-year tax planning, go back and listen to episode 121 of Radical Personal Finance titled "Last-Minute Tax Planning Ideas to Save You Money." That show was very focused on the tactics, some specific tax ideas. Today I'm just talking about personal finance, which by the way, for those of you who are new to the show, I use these two terms to mean different things.

Personal finance, I use that term usually to refer to the fundamentals of personal financial management as in talking about how you earn money, how you spend money, budgeting, couponing, bargain shopping, details on just those basics of personal money management, keeping a checkbook, et cetera. I use financial planning to refer to the more technical topics such as insurance choices or asset allocation, et cetera.

I don't know if that's right, wrong. I don't know if anyone else does that. That's just what I do. So you'll often hear me use a distinction between financial planning and personal finance, and that's what I mean. So for financial planning topics, go back and listen to episode 121.

But recognize this, your end of the year tax planning strategy is not going to make or break your finances, but your personal financial planning strategy may. Your end of the year assessment of the previous calendar year might make a huge difference for you. The end of the year planning process needs to start – we'll get to the process in just a second.

Here's why these two weeks are so important. It's because there's time between now – you're kind of in that end of the year wrap-up season – but before we wind up in Christmas. You've got to get this done in the next two weeks before you go into the actual Christmas holiday or if you're traveling, et cetera, or any kind of last-minute Christmas rush.

Many of you might buy Christmas presents to give to people and so there is a little bit of a shopping rush. A few years ago, my wife and I decided that the phrase of, "Oh, I'm so busy. It's such a busy time of year. We're so busy. We're so busy," is more pontificating to sound important than it is actual reality.

We're not that busy in December. It's not like we're that socialites that we have a Christmas – oh, we have so many Christmas parties to go to and I would guess that you're probably the same. Now if you're an exception, fine. But remember, you choose how many parties you accept invitations to.

You choose how busy you are. Don't buy into that nonsense. You're not that busy in December. You choose to become busy because you either allow yourself to be or you just allow yourself to have the feelings of being busy because it's a bustling, fun time of year. So focus on the next two weeks and here's my coaching tip and we'll get to how in just a moment.

The coaching tip is this. Schedule some time today and that's going to be the action step. Schedule some time today in your calendar for you to sit down with a notebook and reflect back on the past year, what's gone well, what hasn't gone well, what's gone well for you personally, professionally, financially.

It's time for you to think back and to consider what you'd like to be different. If you're up for it, you can do more categories. I just finished – right before hitting record here, I just finished taking Michael Hyatt's life score assessment. Michael Hyatt is a popular – he calls himself a mentor, business mentor, online guy.

He does this course that he does called The Best Year Ever. My brother has done it. I've never done it personally but my brother has done it and had a great experience with it. But he goes – went through his – as part of his best year ever running up to his launch for the course, he has published this life score assessment.

It's pretty cool because he goes through his – the domains and he goes through your intellectual assessment for your intellectual life, your marital situation, how happy you are with your job and your chosen vocation, your emotional life, how you feel you're doing as a parent with your parental role, your hobbies, your avocations, how you are with your spiritual life, your physical well-being, your social life and your financial life.

I thought just his list of 10 areas of assessment was really, really valuable and I wrote down and took screenshots of – as I was going through the assessment of his actual questions so that I could reflect on them more myself. If you want to check out what he's doing, I'll post my link.

It's an affiliate link for you to participate and read. The assessment is free. But I'll post that link for you in the blog post for today's show. And check it out. It's worth – just for the price of admission for the questions, it's free questions. It's awesome, really, really good.

But sit down and think about what's gone well and what hasn't gone well and do that yourself first. Then if you're married, schedule some time today, schedule some time over the next couple of weeks for you to get together at a minimum for a few hours over dinner, over coffee, for a minimum few hours with your husband or wife.

Ideally, perhaps an overnight or even a weekend away, meaning two nights away and one entire day. It's what my wife and I are trying to do. My daughter is having some – I don't want – concerned about inducing separation anxiety. We're planning to take her away here in the first week or two of December.

But at the moment, I think we might just do the shortened version of that this year. But this is the perfect time to do it and schedule those couple of nights and sit down with your husband and wife. Have them go through and do some journaling exercises. Have them go through and think through some of the things that have gone well and things that haven't gone well and what you'd like to do different.

What do you want 2017 to look like in a perfect world? What do you want it to look like in each of those areas? Go take Michael Hyatt's life score assessment. There are tons of great resources out there. Pick something and start reflecting. Start considering it. Start considering what – consider the scope of your life.

With regard to how to do it, don't be scared to face the honest facts. I'm working on a course and my goal is to get it launched here in a couple of weeks so that it can be for 2017. We'll see if I can make it happen. I just have been setting up the software and I'm working on the outline and I'm diligently working to try to set up a course for – I haven't decided if I'm going to pursue it monthly or weekly but basically it's going to be Joshua's 52-week financial boot camper or I don't know, some better title than that.

But the weekly – the things that you can do every single week and I'm going to put it together as a paid course and sell it to you all. And so I've been working hard on that outline. And one of the – so step one at the moment is the first lesson is simply to write down where you are.

So I've been thinking about that as I was working on the outline of what I want to teach where you begin by recognizing here's where I am. And with finances, that means you make a list of all of your assets and all of your liabilities. You write down the amount of money that you have in the bank.

You write down the value of your cars, the value of your house. You write down how much credit card debt you have. That's where you start is by taking an honest assessment of where you are. Now my experience as a financial planner having done even extensive work with people who are in financial crises is that they just don't simply want to face the facts.

I can relate to that with regard to weight. Someone who's been overweight for practically all of my life, you often don't want to go stand on the scale and see the numbers that are there. You got to start with actually understanding and facing the facts. You got to face the facts no matter whether you're happy with them or whether you're not happy with them.

If you're happy with them, great. You need to know what's working. What can you keep doing? If you're not happy with them, great. You need to know what's not working and what you don't want to keep doing so that you can figure out how to get out. To begin with an honest assessment of your year.

For me as I'm doing this, I have to confess I cheated. I started before December 1. But it was because I was so frustrated with my entire year. So I probably started back around November 1. For me there's been a big change even in regard to my own process.

As I went through this process, episode 379 where I talked about, it was the one titled The Perils of Success and Why I'm Taking the Filter Off of Radical Personal Finance. That show came out of just a deep frustration with so many unrealized goals, with so many just deep frustrations.

I started with an assessment. Why am I frustrated? Why is this not working? What is wrong? And so since then it's been fantastic. I just have given myself the permission to face things forthrightly. So I say that simply to convey to you that even when things aren't working, you've got to start by recognizing things aren't working.

And it's not going to get better by ignoring the situation. Things aren't going to improve by not paying attention. Starting point is to recognize where things are. So I simply challenge you with that today. Today is Thursday, December 1, 2016. I want you to get a simple notebook. You don't need to go buy anything.

Just find some simple notebook and spend some time thinking about what's gone well. Let's just do it this way. Write down what's gone well for you personally in 2016, professionally in 2016, and financially in 2016. If this is the first time you've done it, yeah, maybe you can go and take a 10-part thing, but maybe you should just start with those three.

Write down what's gone well. Write down what hasn't gone well. And then to use Dan Sullivan's magic question, although he would put the three-year time frame on it, I'm just going to change it to one year. Write down this. If we were sitting down, you and me, having a cup of coffee on December 1, 2017, because remember you're going to be the pro at this and you're going to be reflecting back before the calendar year.

It's the whole point of the show. So we're sitting here December 1, 2017, looking back over the last 12 months, what has to have happened for you personally, professionally, and financially for you to really feel satisfied with your progress? What are you working towards? I challenge you with that homework.

It's December 1, 2016. It's a brand new day. If you are not feeling great about the last year of your life, remember this. It's my old buddy Zig Ziglar who for years kept me motivated and upbeat used to say, failure is an event. It's not a person. Me, Joshua Sheets, I have failed on most of my goals for this past year.

I have utterly, absolutely failed. But I'm not a failure. I, Joshua Sheets, I'm not a failure and you are not a failure either. Failure is an event. It's not a person. This year is about to end, but yesterday ended last night. Today is a brand new day and it's yours.

There's your Zig quote. I used to love listening to him say that. Be driving to work and facing, battling the monsters of that day. Failure is an event. It's not a person. Yesterday really did end last night. Today is a brand new day and it's yours. You can start afresh.

2016 is going away. 2017 is coming in. Take stock of the past year and make plans for the next year. So if you failed, join the club. Every person who's successful at anything has a long string of failures behind them. Failures are the stories that help you sell your story of success down the road.

Nobody likes to hear somebody who's, that's what I tell myself anyway, it's true, you have to judge, but nobody likes to hear someone who comes in and says, "Hey, it was all easy for me. This was great. I just always, life's just always been, I've been a winner since the day I was born." No, it doesn't work that way.

There's always a failure and then there's a moment of transformation. So guess what? If you failed this last year, you're just building stories that you'll need in the future. And many of you didn't fail this last year. Many of you crushed it and that's awesome. You still need to reflect and you still need to consider back and you most importantly need to think about what was it that worked well because there is a tremendous danger in success.

One of the major dangers is that you'll stop doing the things that made you successful in the first place. Consider a marriage, husband and wife. They're courting one another, they're not married yet. What do they do? They have all their focus and their attention on one another. They're so engaged and interested in one another.

They listen to one another carefully. The man looks across the table at the woman and just thinks about how much he loves her and how much he loves listening to her. What can happen if you're not careful? The familiarity of marriage can breed contempt. Stop listening to one another.

Now you have all these ridiculous jokes about men not listening to their wives and tuning them out, etc. Guess what? Not a good formula for success. You stop doing what made you successful. Now there are changes in the same way that you would never expect a healthy, successful, 10-year-long marriage to look as juvenile as the affections of a young courting couple.

I would be concerned if I were interacting with a couple who's been married 10 years, I'd be concerned if their love was as immature as a courting couple. But I want to see the basic foundations continue. I want them to continue in my marriage. My wife and I are coming up on our fifth, this January 1 will be our fifth wedding anniversary.

So I want to see the foundations are still there, but there should be a greater expression. It's the same thing with any kind of success that you've had in your life, especially financial success. There will be a growth, there will be a maturity, there will be a deepening, there'll be a growth to your life.

But you want to make sure that you're identifying those basic things that have been working that you need to keep doing. Understand where the success came from and then what you need to do to sustain it and to grow it. That's my message for you today. It's a brand new day.

It's a brand new month. I hope this is encouraging to you. Second step for today is set that appointment with yourself, with your spouse. Few hours, you in a notebook with your cell phone and a Facebook turned off. Spend some time thinking. If you're not a writer, get out the voice dictation system on your phone.

If that doesn't work for you, just record voice memos. Get your thoughts out of your head and into some place that you can look at them. Think about what's gone well, what hasn't gone well, and what you want the next year of your life to look like. If you are just getting started, start with just those three areas, personally, professionally, financially.

If you have done this before, maybe take Michael Hyatt's life score assessment. Use his questions, intellectual, marital, emotional, parental, physical, social, financial, vocational, avocational, spiritual. Use all those areas and do a more comprehensive form. The format doesn't matter. It's the action that makes the difference. Hey, Cricket customers, Max with Ads is included with your Cricket $60 unlimited plan at no additional cost.

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