How To Grow Finances -A Gardening Analogy [Video]

by Michelle Smalenberger, CFP® / June 15, 2021

This summer one of the things we decided to do again was to plant a garden. Now that our daughter is a little bit older she can help with the planting, pulling weeds, watering and the other fun things that come along. It’s been fun because she can start to see the process of where our food comes from as we’re working together.

We planted the garden a few weeks ago and one vegetable we like to grow is corn. I noticed as I was watering something had bit off the top of some of the corn plants that had started to grow. It almost looked like something had eaten it. The same day we planted our garden we saw a deer walk through our yard. It was a reminder that since our garden is growing now we need to get our fence up to protect the plants from getting eaten.

How to Grow Finances like a Garden

This was such a great analogy on how to grow finances. There is a natural order of how things get taken care of.  It is really a process to show that different stages accomplish different things.

  1. Plant:  Getting started by depositing money or choosing what account to save in.
  2. Sun/Water:  Continuing to add money or paying down debt to make progress.
  3. Protect:  Adding estate planning documents or insurance policies
  4. Weeds:  Amending documents, changing the amount of insurance, changing the savings amounts, or saving to different types of accounts.
  5. Harvest:  Reach a goal!

Therefore, if we don’t take care of these WEEDS it can start to crowd out all of the good things that were already started before.  It’s important that over time you’re taking care of these little things step by step. Because in the end we really want to HARVEST and grow our finances!

Finally it’s fun to see in real life analogies all you are accomplishing in various areas of your life. Which reminds me, we have to get our fence up before something comes to eat our corn.

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