The Three Personal Finance People You Need In Life

Did you know you need at least three personal finance people in your life? If not, then perhaps that’s why you might be struggling financially. Let me walk you through my personal finance people.

Personal Finance Mentor

A personal finance mentor provides financial guidance, advice, feedback on skills, and coaching. This type of mentor can be found in many places:

Family – Do you have a rich or successful relative in your family? What about your extended family? Or friends of family? If so, ask if they are willing to mentor you. If you don’t have any of these don’t despair!

Online – If you live in a remote area or don’t have access to people, there are many places to seek out mentors even if they are not in person. If you are getting started, it’s easy to find online resources that will help mentor you. Even YouTube has some great mentors these days just be sure you are moving in the right direction following advice, if not, dump the YouTuber and move on to someone else. Over time you will discover that most YouTuber’s knowledge is limited to a specific area or topic and you will outgrow them. That’s ok, it happens. Our kids have effectively outgrown what we can do for them now, it’s part of the growing process.

Meetup – When I got started in real estate rentals, I knew very little but I quickly found groups online at Meetup.com that were dedicated real estate people that ran a real estate investment network. I joined and was able to learn and share my real estate experiences and met people that helped me on my journey.

Reddit – There are many investment and personal finance subreddits that can help you with personal finance question and you can always ask anonymously. I list three that I have read over the years.

• r/investing – a place for investing questions
• /r/personalfinance – a place for more advanced topics and questions in personal finance
• /r/povertyfinance – a place for people starting with little or nothing in personal finance

Over the years, I have had many mentors for personal finance and my professional life. I’ll write about those in the future but the most important lesson is that you will eventually outgrow your mentor and that’s perfectly normal and expected. The best thing to do is start with one and build a potential pipeline of mentors as you grow your personal finance capabilities over time. If you are staring out, someone like a Dave Ramsey or Suzie Orman can help but at some point you will outgrow them.

Personal Finance Advocate

A personal finance advocate is someone in your environment who will advocate for you, rooting for your personal finance development and making sure that you continue to grow and even pushes you to do better. Where a mentor teaches, an advocate pushes you to get to the next level.

Image you win the lottery and now have plenty of money but all you want to do is sit on the couch and watch TikTok videos all day. The right personal finance advocate should shame you for being so self-absorbed and lazy and encourage you to do something better with your life not because he/she wants you to hand out money but because they care about you and know that sitting around doing nothing productive is not good over the long term for your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

You know you have the right personal finance advocate when he/she continuously asks you this one question: “Is that really the best you could do?” You will often find that it wasn’t and you were just being lazy.

Personal Finance Sponsor

A personal finance sponsor is someone that is there to support you through good times and bad. Our kids have us as their personal finance sponsor to help co-sign new car loans and college student loans along with all the other intermediary support they’ve needed. We are their ultimate safety net however we have advised them that we won’t live forever and they need to have their own personal finance sponsor as they grow older.

As our kids get older, their financial sponsor will morph more into trust funds and investment accounts than a specific person and they are likely to become the personal finance sponsor for their own kids or others as they grow. We are teaching them the importance of giving back to others as they have received from others.

Cerberus Won’t Work

Cerberus is a Greek mythological creature that guarded the dead from leaving the underworld. It is an appropriate figure for trying to depict something as trying to serve three different roles such as mentor, advocate and sponsor, despite the three heads, yet being tethered to a single fixed body that can’t do anything beyond keeping you in place. A single person trying to be three different people won’t be able to accomplish much.

You need three different people or resource personas to help you be successful so don’t be lazy, go out and find them!