Keep a steady pace to get ‘there’
- B.J. Yoder: Young Money
- July 13, 2021
- 875
Think back to being a kid. If you were like me, at least once, you packed up the mini van — station wagon, excursion van, take your pick — and took the dreaded drive down to Florida with the promise of sunny skies, warm sand and salty water.
The high of these promises kept you rolling through West Virginia and maybe even Virginia, but then things waned off somewhere in North Carolina and South Carolina. In that area comes one of the most dreaded questions for a parent: “Mom, dad, are we there yet?” That one question breaks the seal and opens a pathway for that question to be asked many more times for the duration of the trip.
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably far past the stage of asking that out loud, but instead of the road trip down to Florida, switch it over to your financial journey. Have you asked yourself “are we there yet” in your head? Or if you’re just starting, are you riding high off the promise of becoming debt-free, buying that house or saving up for a remodel?
No two people are the same, and no two people are in the same position financially. Everyone is going to be just a little different when it comes to where they are at. Personally, I am starting out, trying to reach goals in the financial part of my life, and honestly, sometimes I’m not feeling like I’m making progress.
In this stage we see people who “have made it,” and we become frustrated with the stage we are in because it seems like these people got there overnight. But we shouldn’t become frustrated because an overnight success is nothing but fiction. It took months and years of hard work to reach the destination the person “who made it” got to, much longer than a trip to Florida.
There are so many times we have asked ourselves if we are there yet because it seems so attainable when we start out. It seems so easy when we write down the goal, but the valleys are where we become doubtful we will ever get there. Those valleys are where something goes wrong in the process. To relate it to the road trip theme, these low points are the flat tires, the overheating, the traffic jams, all things that can be worked through but at the time seem like the end of the world.
Navigating the bottoms is a tough thing to do, especially when the journey to the financial goal seems to be filled with only valleys, like when you’re saving up to remodel your house and the air-conditioning unit goes out and that repair takes out a third of your fund. Or worse yet, and I have heard of this example recently, you’ve been working and saving to build your dream house, and suddenly lumber prices are skyrocketing and the dream house either must be modified or scratched. That’s when asking “are we there yet” almost becomes painful.
Why should we not ask ourselves this question? I believe we shouldn’t because, like Florida, it makes the trip seem longer. If you wake up every morning and ask yourself this question, you will dwell on that all day long, and there’s no point in worrying over something you can’t control.
What should be done is keeping a steady pace, but that pace won’t be kept the entire time of the trek. There will be times when you feel like you’re on cruise control, but there will be a lot of times you will have to press the brakes and stop and re-evaluate.
It isn’t a straight line up. Like I said, there are many valleys to traverse, but keep the end goal in mind and keep moving forward, even if it’s a mile or just an inch. Reaching the destination will help you forget all the times you thought or asked, “Are we there yet?”