How do you spend your time? Have you ever thought about this? Have you ever mapped out or tracked how you actually spend each hour of a given day, week, or month? I never used to think much about how I spent the hours of each day. I just took each day one at a time and did what needed to be done.
As a young child, my only cares were to try and cram as much time with friends, video games, or playing soccer, as I could into each day. I’d like to say that I spent less time on video games when I became a teenager, but it was honestly probably more. I also dedicated more time to playing soccer and other high school sports like track, basketball, and lacrosse. Spending time with friends and also my girlfriend at the time became higher priorities and I most likely sacrificed sleep and schoolwork to compensate for this shift in time priorities. By the time I reached college, I dropped out of playing sports and did eventually reduce the amount of time spent playing video games. I was no longer dating my high school girlfriend and more time became dedicated to friendships, working to pay my bills, determining a career path, and dating with the intention of finding a future spouse (which I did eventually find, but not until a few years after college graduation).
When I started my financial planning practice in 2013 (age 25), my life quickly became unbalanced. Maybe my life had always been unbalanced, but I started to become acutely more and more aware of the imbalance around this time in my life. My shift in awareness might have to do with the fact that I also married my wife in 2013 and I now had the responsibility of another person in my life. Come to think of it, this awareness of balance has only increased as my responsibilities to other people (i.e. spouse, children, etc.) also increased (more on his later on). Trying to grow my practice from scratch, with no salary, and no clients to start with demanded a large amount of my time, and I clearly remember working from 8am – 8pm most days. I also worked on weekends, and offered to meet with prospective clients basically any time they were available, except on Sundays.
My life quickly became about 90% focused on building up my practice with 10% remaining for everything else. As you can imagine, this causes all sorts of challenges with faith, marriage, health, friendships, and family relationships. I thoroughly enjoyed the work I was doing, loved the fact that I was building a business from the ground up, and felt a calling to the value I was providing to clients and their families – all good things, except for the fact that the rest of my life was suffering as a result. How could something that I enjoyed and felt a sense of purpose from, be bad?
Well, God intervened. Not in the way we might expect…I’ve come to believe that he rarely intervenes in the ways we expect him to. I can now reflect back on the first 10 years of my financial planning career and see how out of control unbalanced it was. And God could see it too. He intervened by providing my wife and I with our first child, a son in 2017. Then, since I didn’t quite take the hint and was still quite unbalanced, he blessed us with twin girls in 2019, and just to drive the point home, he gave us one more son in 2022. Slowly, over the past few years, my focus and attention and purpose has shifted more and more towards my wife and children.
I used to believe that God created me to be a financial planner. But, now I see that I was created to be a Christian, husband, father, and financial planner…in that order. The responsibilities that I now have as a father, to raise my children with a Christian worldview in a broken and sinful world, now overshadow my goals of financial success and prestige from building a successful financial planning practice. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in providing high quality financial advice to clients and operating a successful business, but it no longer takes up 90% of my time and energy, and I believe that my faith, marriage, friendships, children, and clients are all better off because of my focus on seeking a more balanced life.