Survival Tier Cash Flow: Ian Bloom, CFP® covers the Hierarchy of Cash Flow and the Survival stage. Thinking about your cash flow in the survival tier, you should be prioritizing more income and reducing expenses so that you can afford your basic needs.
TRANSCRIPT:
What’s up internet? My name’s Ian Bloom. Welcome to Nerd Finance. I’m your resident, financial life planner and huge nerd. In today’s episode, we are going to be talking about this graphic that I just came up with. And it’s going to be the subject of a couple of conversations we’re going to have on this channel over the next three, four weeks. You see, this is a hierarchy of cash flow, and basically it’s designed to help you think about where you are and what things you should be focusing on with your spending money. Now, what I want to emphasize is much like the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or the food pyramid, just because something is foundational and comes first like survival, it doesn’t mean that you should never spend any money on extras if you’re in the survival stage. But what it does mean is that most of your money, time, and energy should be focused on the thing for the stage that you are currently at.
So let’s talk a little bit about that in terms that a nerd like me might think about it. The survival stage, this first stage is when you are level one. It is when you’re first starting to get a handle on the games mechanics, and the things that you should be thinking about and focusing on in order to make sure your character doesn’t die or put themselves in a very unfortunate untenable situation. You might be learning how to cast your first magic spells or do battle with an Orc. But in reality, what this looks like is maybe you’re graduating from college, or maybe you’ve been out of college for a while, but finances were pretty hard for you. And so you’re starting to figure out that your income needs to be greater than your expenses in order for you to ascend to the next stage, which is stability, or maybe you’ve been here for a while.
In fact, unfortunately, a lot of Americans are back in this position due to the pandemic for the first time. You see, survival is when you’re focused on keeping the roof over your head. It’s when you’re focused on putting food on the table or paying the bills. And essentially, the thing that gets you out of the survival state is having a consistent income that is greater than your expenses.
Now, this may mean that your income needs to rise. Like you just lost your job and you need to find a new one, or you need that new promotion, or it may mean that your expenses need to fall. And expenses falling is one of the hardest things to do because you get used to the spending and all those things. Also, even though I said earlier in the video that you don’t need to not spend any money on extras during the survival stage, because sometimes spending a little bit on yourself can keep you sane and rewarded, some people tend to spend a little bit too much on extras way too early in this hierarchy.
You see, extras are those things that are advertised to you all the time. And so they’re very tempting to spend money on, but for survival, you need to focus on the basics, food, water, shelter. And probably electricity and internet in this day and age, let’s be honest. It’s hard to work without the internet. So anyway, for the next three, four weeks, we’re going to be ascending through this pyramid and talking about the rest of the stages. And I hope that this conversation is interesting to you. There’s a lot to talk about here. Cashflow is something that I deal with as a financial planner all the time. So if you have questions, make sure to leave them down below or send me an email or just book an appointment on my website. Anyway, I hope this video was helpful to you. Have a wonderful day.
