Purpose and change coach: My finances and planning for the future

I'm Alex Durand. I'm 27 years old. I'm a purpose and change coach, and I make just over $50,000 a year. To be frank, I didn't really know what the value of a dollar was till I started my own business. When I came out of school and was making what I now know was a lot of money, it didn't feel real to me. It felt... I knew that I was working for it and that somebody wired a paycheck every two weeks, but I was spoiled, and I didn't understand what it meant, what that quantity of money meant, and I spent it recklessly, and I didn't have a budget, and all I knew was that I could spend a lot of money. In two weeks, there was more money in my account and it didn't really matter. If I had had a budget and I, you know, had had the perspective to know that I wasn't gonna live my life two weeks at a time during those early years, I would have saved a lot more, and it perhaps would have changed the financial trajectory of the business in those first couple years. So my partner and I are constantly talking about what our financial goals are. We live together, and for us, it's about building that future in a way that works for us and what we want out of life. So first and foremost, the first financial goal is just eventually being able to achieve predictability of income, is not having to live and die each year with not knowing, right, with being to... It's really hard to plan your year when you can't for sure know what the floor of your income is gonna be. It's one thing for you to say, "Well, this is gonna be my max," but if you don't know your floor, it becomes challenging and stressful. So that's the first goal, is to achieve some kind of predictability in the floor forecast, and long-term, it's to get to that $250,000, $300,000 cap of what coaching businesses or what solo-owned coaching businesses can make. Some of that is gonna come by doing corporate work, right, working with companies who are rethinking what it means to work with their young talent and with their mid-career talent and investing in them and seeing that leadership development is a two-way street and not just a trickle-down approach. Some of it is gonna continue to be from our referral business continuing to grow over time as more people get exposed to the work that we do and the people in their communities see the changes that they make in their life. That's the trend that is most consistent for us right now, and as our clients who also tend to be between 27 and 40 years old enter positions of authority, we anticipate that the work that we'll do in corporations, with organizations, nonprofit and for-profit, will grow over time as they think of us when they think about the talent that they bring on and the companies that they start. So those are really the two biggest firsts in the short term, predictability of income, and long term is optimizing the ceiling of this kind of business so that we can live comfortably and also have the money to properly invest in our savings and retirement accounts and, you know, be able to proactively think about wealth management options and also what that means for investment in ourselves and the other kinds of things that we want to do with our work and with our lives.