How to Invest Your Money Wisely

With the economy slowly coming back to life, there are still many who need to watch the business budget as well as the household budget. Knowing what’s important to spend money on, and what’s not, is key to thriving in a recovery economy.

There’s another aspect to staying financially healthy also. Whether you call it the law of attraction or sub-conscious programming, panicking and hanging on to every penny only slows down the flow of money coming in even more. I’ve seen it happen with others, and I’ve experienced it firsthand in the past myself.

The trick is, as I tell my kids, to “spend our money wisely.” When my kids wanted a $500 Lego set (which by the way, I wouldn’t buy if I were Howard Hughes, just on priciple!) I said “We spend our money wisely, and that’s not a wise choice. 

Money needs to flow. If you want it to flow in, then it needs to flow out. There are ways to reduce your business expenses while still spending your money wisely where it counts.

Here are 5 ways to reduce business expenses while still investing in what’s important:

Forget the website, get the clients
The number one mistake newer coaches and experts make is thinking they need to invest a lot of money into a website right off the bat. Not so. I know a very successful coach who hit 6 figures with no website. Whenever anyone asked to see her site, she said it was “under construction” and sent them a pdf attachment with the information they wanted!

Now I’m not suggesting you go that far. But the most critical piece of your online marketing is your free taste, and all you need for that is an opt-in page, a couple of auto-responders and a download page. The download page acts like a “mini-website,” and has everything on it people would normally see on a website. Viola!

Quick, easy, and very inexpensive. Plus, you can incorporate both into your bigger website when the time comes. 

Alternatively, a one-page website will often do just fine, until the amount of money you have to “spend wisely” increases.
 

Take advantage of the freebies
There’s a lot of valuable information out there from great business coaches, that is completely free. Choose one mentor to invest in to get the personal attention your business needs to grow, then gather all the free wisdom you can from the telesummits, free tastes, articles and videos put out there by different coaches. You do want to invest wisely in one mentor, however, because there’s no substitute for personal attention. I’ve seen coaches and experts flounder for years thinking they “should be able to do it on their own.” Here’s the truth: none of do it on our own, myself included. Every successful business and marketing coach I know has always had a mentor.
 

Don’t spend a mint on office space.
One of my close friends, an MFT, just got her license and found an office space, with a waiting room, for only $200 a month! How? She shopped around. You know what else is amazing? She had choices! There were several other people willing to “time-share” an office with her for even less than that. In addition, there are telecommute office buildings in some areas who will rent out an office for a very reasonable price. There’s one in my area that will go as low as $7 an hour, if you buy a bundle of hours.
 

Make sure it’s an investment, not an expense.
Calculate the return on any business investment you make. If there isn’t a clear return, it’s probably not necessary right now. By the same token, if you see a return, do a quick calculation to see how much it might cost you not to make the investment. If that number is high, count it as revenue lost if you don’t wisely invest right now.