Financial Reflections

The New York Times just ran an interesting article comparing business budgeting to home budgeting. Apparently, many an entrepreneur out there doesn’t budget as well in their personal lives as they do with their business.

The article references another personal finance blogger, David Ning, who makes and interesting observation: “In order to be successful, the entrepreneur has to be convicted in the decisions that are made. This is the only way to be able to lead other people to follow and execute his/her direction with confidence.” Yes, entrepreneurs go for broke, and sometime go broke (or strike it rich). My own situation is a little different. I found that while trying an internet startup over the past two years, I found I was so busy, that I had little time to micromanage my own funds, or even mow the lawn.

This seems to go against two of my favorite books, The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind. Both paint the “successful” business people (ones with big net worth) as ones who apply the same discipline of budgeting for their business to their personal lives. Applying this advice to my personal situation might help me in both my personal and business ventures.

When it comes down to it, we operate at a personal level much the way as a business does — at a profit or at a loss.

I can take away one really good point from The Millionaire Mind. Often people who pursue businesses prefer to get help with task that have minimal return, like lawn mowing. I recently signed up with mint.com and plan on doing a review soon. Mint is a personal finance tool that allegedly does just about everything — except mow the lawn. Time will tell.

In the mean time, I’ve done two other things. First I’ve set aside the startup. To be honest, it wasn’t working out like I had hoped and after two years my optimism had dried up. That will free up some time to blog keep a better budget and develop my next plan to rule the world.

Here’s the NYT Article.