Rewrite Your Money Blueprint for Rosh Hashana

You are listening to the Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, episode number 186.

Hello my friends and welcome back to the podcast. This is the first episode in a very long time. That is a solo episode. I had a lot of fun over the summer doing a series of interviews. It's like two months, maybe even three months. I have met so many fantastic entrepreneurs in different businesses, different niches, building businesses, their own way, building wealth, their own way.

I so much enjoyed meeting every single person and I've expanded my network. I've learned new ideas and what other struggles other entrepreneurs are dealing with different ways of growing wealth and building your money and investing in your business. It has been a fantastic opportunity for me, and if you haven't had a chance, you are busy over the summer.

I mean summer kids vacations. I totally get it. Make some time, maybe not now, right before Rosh Hashanah, it is one week before the Jewish New Year. As I record this podcast, it will drop closer to the Jewish New Year, but make some time to go back through older episodes and discover what other people are doing.

I interviewed entrepreneurs in service-based businesses, product-based businesses. I interviewed my daughter, Leni Schultz, who is building her own business. She's a new entrepreneur, so there is such a variety that you can really explore when you go into the a hundred and seventies, early hundred and eighties.

Those are the episode numbers and find something new. But here we are, as I said, one week before the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and I thought that this was an opportune time to talk about rewriting your money blueprint because Rosh Hashanah is a time of reflection. The month before, the month of Elul, we know that God, the king is in the field.

He's close to us. This is a time for us to reconnect with our king, with our God, with our Creator. It's also a time on Rosh Hashanah when your money, your income for the entire next year is going to be set. So what better time than right now to really think about your relationship with money and how you can create a better money blueprint for you as the CEO of your business?

The upcoming Jewish year. So let me start by even defining for you what is a blueprint, because we hear this word you most probably connected with an architect, but what does blueprint have to do with money? And actually blueprint has to do with the Torah and how God created the world. We're gonna get there, stay with me.

But a blueprint is a detailed plan. It's like your master plan for how you're going to build a building if you're an architect, right? It's gonna lay out the dimensions, the structure, the systems, like electricity and plumbing. Every building has to have electricity and plumbing, right? The blueprint is gonna show you where the doors need to be, the walls, the windows.

The ceilings, how tall, how thick the walls are gonna be. Right? The builder can't just go, or the building crew can't just go and build a business. It's not like the contractor or the architect says, go out there, go build a building. And you know, it would be really nice if it has an ocean view. I love the ocean.

Give me a building with an ocean view like. It just doesn't work like that. Can you imagine the construction crew? This one's gonna be hammering, this one's gonna be sawing. They're not gonna work together. And you're, you know, when kids build things and they just, they're very creative and they put some sticks here, some animals there, some Legos there, some blocks there.

And I mean, they're very creative. And even today, sort of develop the plan as it goes along. But if they're trying to build one of those towers. They need to think about it. There needs to be some engineering and skill behind it. You can't just start building without a plan. And of course, our Torah is the same way.

It is the blueprint for the world, and we know that God looked into the Torah and he created the world. That was like the master plan. That is the master plan for our world. It's not like God just like threw things out there. And just said, whatever happens. No, our creator has a plan for the world.

We're just not, you know, he doesn't tell us really about it. He gives us hints, lots of very good hints, but, he doesn't tell us exactly what's going on except for what's in the Torah. But everything that comes out after that, we learn from our sources, from our oral sources, from our rabbis, et cetera.

But we're not going there today. So, ah. So how does your blueprint, let's say that again. So how does a blueprint connect with money? And really it's the same thing because your master plan for your money is formed by how you. Think about money, the structures and systems you build for your money, like bank accounts, like the prices that you set for your services or your products, your plan for how you're gonna grow your business over the next year, the next two years, the next three years.

How you build wealth for your family over long periods of time, what your thoughts are about debt, and how much debt you feel comfortable going into. Even insurance, right? Insurance is a way for you to protect your wealth so that if. There is a big financial calamity. Something that you wouldn't be able to manage just by, you know, even if it was like a medical expense and you could put it on a credit card and pay it off over six months or a year, but if there's gonna be a huge financial expense from something, you would want insurance because insurance is there to protect you.

There are so many different aspects of money and how we manage money. I once did a very quick brain download of different ways that money. Enters and exits our life, and I came up with 21 different categories and we're not gonna go into all 21 today. Maybe I'll do that at another time, or little by little, but there has to be some sort of overriding master plan.

Overriding blueprint for how you manage your money. And you might have systems in one aspect of your money, but you're lacking systems in other parts of your money, or you're lacking structure, you're lacking you. You lack future casting, thinking about the future and how you're gonna plan, for example.

Are you making regular contributions to your retirement accounts? Most of us are going to get to 65 75, 85 95, as we say, in Hebrew to 120, but if you're not creating a future. For your finances, a retirement account, an investment account, then there is no master plan. There is no blueprint for your money.

And so your thoughts about money, your beliefs, how you think about it, these subconscious programming that you downloaded from your parents, from your community, from your peers, from your colleagues, that tells you this subconscious programming, what you think is true about money or not true about money.

Right. All of these are driving your money decisions. Like the people say, no, it's not about the money. I don't care about the money. And then when they have a big medical expense, I hope they never do, but it wasn't about the money. They didn't plan for it. They didn't think that they were going to ever have medical expenses.

I have to tell you, I was just speaking with a friend of mine, she's at least 10 years older than I. I am. And she told me that in the last six months she uncovered some irregularities in her heart and she has spent a lot of time in the last six months taking care of her heart. She's in her seventies, hasn't hit 80 yet.

And this is something that we do have to deal with as we age and having a future plan. For example, if you have young children. Your God willing, your children are going to get married, so you're gonna want to have money set aside for wedding expenses. You might wanna have money set aside if you want your kids to go to college to help pay for their college.

So let's just talk about reasons why, and I've given you a many, many hints, reasons why you might wanna think about how you are going to rewrite your money blueprint. In the coming year. So first of all, if you don't have any investment accounts, you're not investing to build long-term wealth. You're not in investing to build sustainable wealth for your family, for your future, your retirement, like that's number one reason why you might want to rewrite your money blueprint.

Number two, you might be making money. But not keeping money, and whether that's in employment or maybe your partner is employed and you have a business, you're making a lot of money, or you're making enough money, you're making some money, but you're not keeping it. That means you don't have money that's set aside in an emergency fund, or I like to call it a financial freedom fund for those.

Whoopsies, those unexpected expenses that always happen. And if you don't have money, set aside for unexpected expenses and it can be good things. Maybe your best friend who maybe your best friends who lives on the other side of the United States is going to be making a wedding and you wanna fly there to help too.

Maybe your best friend who lives on the other coast in the United States, let's say you live on the East coast, she lives on the West coast, she's making a wedding, her daughter's getting married. She's your best friend. You don't see each other very often, and you want to be there to celebrate her with her.

And if you don't have that money set aside in an account, that financial freedom account. Well, you might put it on a credit card, and this is how credit card expenses go up and up and up and up, is that we don't have money set aside for the future, things that are going to come up. So number one, you're not investing for your future long-term wealth, sustainable wealth.

You're making money now, but you're not keeping it, which means you might not have enough money to set aside for wealth. What if you are making money? But when it comes time to pay your taxes, you don't have money set aside in a tax account. And this happens to a lot of entrepreneurs, is that they bring money in and they somehow forget that the tax authorities are going to want part of that money.

What it really means is that you brought money into your bank account through your business, but from the get go, not all of that money was yours. In Israel, for example, we pay 18% VAT value added tax. So if I make a hundred dollars in my business and I charge 18% VAT $118 comes into my bank account, but guess what?

$18 does not belong to me. I might be able to offset that tax money that VAT that has to go to the tax authorities with business expenses, but that's a different animal. You wanna make sure that if you know that you are liable to pay taxes, then when money comes into your account, you are automatically setting aside money for those future payments that you know are going to happen.

It's kind of like another financial freedom account. So make sure that you are managing your money in your business. Sensibly and responsibly. And another reason why you might wanna start rewriting your money blueprint is because you might not even be looking at your numbers. And this happens. I know that when we're starting businesses, there is so much to do, and I've had this with many, many clients and there's absolutely no shame involved.

But if you're bringing money in to your business and you have no clue what's going on, and I've worked PE with people who are making multiple six figures, half a million dollars, $800,000, close to a million dollars in their business and everything. Is mug muddy and foggy and messy in their business. One of my clients, they really, really thanked me after we worked together six months, nine months, and she told me that she and her husband like manage their money like little Hawks looking now for all the discrepancies they cleaned up.

So much in their business, and they totally love managing their finances now because they discover things, they see things, and when you see it, you can fix it very, very quickly. So if you're not looking at your numbers, either your personal financial numbers or your business financial numbers, this is your wake up call that it's a new year.

Time to rewrite your money blueprint and start looking at the numbers. Another reason why you might want to be resetting your money blueprint is maybe you're like booked out. You are maxed out with the number of clients you can take. I once had a potential client. It didn't work out this way, but she had a waiting list of six months of, you know, clients who really wanted to work with her.

And we, she wasn't calling me at that time for business. she was calling me to speak with me for financial planning and I quoted her my price and she told me those are American prices. It was a woman and she was in Israel very good at what she was doing in the alternative healing space.

And she told me that I had American prices and so she wasn't gonna work with me. Which was her money blueprint, wanting to keep prices low, and my thought was, at that time, this was before I was doing business coaching, was, hey, if she would raise her prices, then she wouldn't have a six month waiting list.

Her best clients would come to her and she would probably be working. Less stressed out, less like feeling really drained by her business and she would have the resources to hire a financial planner. I dunno what ever happened with her. I hope that she resolved it. I hope she, she figured it out and that today her business is thriving.

But I really have no idea. But you want to pay attention if your business is maxed out and you have a six month waiting list. You get to raise your prices because that means you are in demand. And there is this concept that we learned about in economics 1 0 1 called Supply and Demand. If the supply is limited, it is just you and there is a tremendous demand.

You get to raise your prices and I think it's a beautiful thing because then there are other people. None of us are like doing our own very unique thing that's different from everybody else in the world. Maybe if you're like Elon Musk, you're doing something, trying to colonize Mars. That's different from everybody else in the world, but most of us are doing a variety.

Of something that somebody else is doing in the world. It's just our own unique flavor and taste in what we're doing. And so if your people can't pay your rates, they'll either wait, they'll either find the money or they will go to somebody else who they can afford to work with. And it's beautiful.

Oftentimes it means newer people in your industry get that like trickle down the business, the people that can't afford to work with you at your rates, and that way newer. People get to also refine their skills. They get to grow, they get to develop, and I think it's just a beautiful thing. I actually think it is incumbent upon older business owners, especially if you're like a coach or a healer, someone in the service-based business.

I think as we mature in our business and we have more expertise, I think we really do need to raise our prices because there will always be younger people coming in and we want them to have business Also, there is no shortage. There's no scarcity. There is enough business for everybody to go, for there is enough business for everybody.

There's enough money to go around to everybody. So if you're maxed out, number one, raise your prices. Number two, it's time to consider a scalable business model where you introduce a one-to-many leveraged. Business model so that you can, instead of just trading dollars for hours, you can actually work with multiple people and serve them in the same hour.

And then the last wake up call that it might be the time for you to rewrite your money blueprint, is that you are not investing in yourself as a business owner. You are not investing in building. A long term, sustainable, scalable business, right? I just touched on this a little bit, but again, you can continue trading dollars for hours, and if you're a coach, for example, like me, you could work with like 20, 25 clients a week.

I mean, 25 would be like a lot. Five clients every single day, five hours a day of coaching. And then I still need to do my administration. I need to do my marketing, my selling. I need to do thinking, I need to have CEO thinking time. 25 clients in one week. I've never served that many clients in one week.

On a one-on-one model, it would be a huge stretch. So think about how you're showing up right now in your business. If you are maxed out and you haven't yet figured out how you are going to grow and scale, this is where you need to invest in yourself as a CEO. So you're gonna have more leadership qualities.

It's also. Investing with someone, with a coach, with a consultant, with somebody who can help you to really think bigger, think strategically, think scalability, think also in terms of your mindset and what is possible for you. And I think that. When I look at my own journey as an entrepreneur, one thing that has always been super duper important for me, and I have never backed to down on this, I've never held back on this, is investing in myself as the CEO Since I started my coaching business, when I started my financial planning business, I actually had a mentor.

And interesting that point out, I worked for my mentor in a paid relationship. I was doing like office work for them and not like administration, but other type of work inside the office where I was getting paid like a halftime job so that I had cashflow coming in while I was building my financial planning business.

And my mentor was also training me. So I learned a lot about the financial planning business from my mentor, but I also had to do my own. Learning and research and taking courses, et cetera, on the side. But I always, after that, once I did that for a couple of years. I invested in mentorship, I invested in coaching.

I invested in people who were further along the business building trajectory than I was, and I never let that. Influence me as like, oh my gosh, I'm slowing myself down. I'm in scarcity. I need the money. I need to take the money that I'm earning in my business and I need to bring it home. It was always very clear to me that if I'm building a business very much like building a product based business, any product based business is going to be taking bank loans.

Or maybe they're, if you're starting your own home based product based business, you might be. Borrowing money from your 401k, you're a family member. But people who build product-based businesses know that they need to, let's think about a brick and mortar. They need to find a A space. They need to rent it.

They need to do renovations. They need to buy inventory. Hook up the lights, hook up the water. There is all of that foundational work that's happening. Let's think back to our blueprint. This is exactly the architect's blueprint. I need the space. I need to hook everything up. I need to make sure that there is a window display that all starts, and you pay for that, right?

You invest in your business. Before you sold the first item. For example, if you're a clothing business, everything is all ready to go. Have you ever watched a clothing store, like find a space and be renovated? It happens usually pretty quickly. They clean it out, put in the shelves, paint it, put up the signs, et cetera, and all that is money invested in the business before one blouse or before one dress or one pair of shoes is sold.

And so I went into my business. Always thinking it doesn't need to make money for the first three to five years of my business. And that's what I heard. That's what I read. I know when I first heard it that I shouldn't expect money to be, you know, that I shouldn't expect my business to be profitable. For the first three years I was like, horrified.

I was like, oh my gosh, I need to feed my family. But that's one of the reasons why I took this job for a year with my first mentor. And we and our family, we just lived on a very skinny budget while I was building my business. In the early stages, for example, we don't own a car. We have never owned a car.

My husband has a company car. The company pays for the gas, the insurance, all of the tests, everything. And so we don't have. that expense in our family, and we've always had, you know, almost more family members than we could fit in a car. So it was very clear to us that if we needed a second car, we would either take taxis or rent a car for some period of time, like we did when we went away for our summer holidays in August.

And we just kept our expenses very low until my business was cash flowing enough that I could take money. Into our household. And I think that's part of my money blueprint, which has allowed my business to grow and scale without being in financial scarcity, is that we didn't need the business to take care of our family.

And my clients have heard me say this is that your business is not here to pay your electric bills. Your business is not here to pay your mortgage. And that might be a shocking thought to some people. Because they're like, what are you talking about? I need to pay my food bills. I need to pay for my kids' education.

I need to take care of the rent of the mortgage. Et cetera. But in the early stages of your business, the money that you bring into your business needs to be reinvested back into your business. Your business is young. It's growing. It's like a little baby. it needs baby formula. It needs diapers.

It needs you to take care of the business until it can take care of you. Nobody expects your three month old baby. To be cooking dinner for you, right? So you wouldn't expect your three month old business to start cash flowing your personal life. And that's something that has always been part of my money blueprint, is just managing our money, our family money in a very sensible way.

And my husband and I are both very fortunate that way, is that we tend to be more savers than spenders. And as we've grown and as we've aged and as we've had more kids and grandchildren, we've loosened up some. Still don't own a car, but it's because of our natural, our, you know, the way we're wired for our money blueprint.

We're not overs spenders, we're not big spenders on clothing. I mean, I was recently speaking with a friend of mine in the United States, and she and her family, they take very. Comfortable holidays, we go hiking. We do some extreme sports and we'll hire a guide for that. But we're like the more rough it type of, family holiday type of people.

And she and her family, they're like, they're doing very well. You know, I know this friend of mine very well. They're doing actually very, very well and they do comfortable holidays. But here's something that I found. Fascinating in her Money Blueprint and her family money blueprint is, she has a teenage daughter who's like 17 or 18 year years old, and we chat every so often.

We check in with each other and her teenage daughter. It was cleaning houses to make some money. They live in an area with a lot of large families, kids, you know, who are like younger, and the moms are just, you know, doing all the things. And her 17, 18-year-old daughter goes from house to house and she helps with the cleaning and cleaning the toilets and folding the laundry, doing the mopping.

Right? Here's a girl, a young woman really who is being. Educated in terms of her money blueprint, that doing hard work is okay. Doing work that some people might find demeaning is okay. And I was just so impressed with my friend. I was like, wow, do you realize what skills you're giving your daughter? Do you realize what a future like you're giving your daughter?

And of course, I like talking about money, so I just talk about this kind of stuff all the time. But it was just so much. Fun really to speak with my friend and see the subconscious money programming that she was really giving to her kids is that there's no embarrassment, there's no shame if you wanna go out and make some pocket money or some spending money, or if you wanna use it to build long-term wealth.

Maybe she was mirroring what she saw at home. Is that her parents? Yes. Give the family comfortable vacations. Do they also invest for the future? So really think about your money messaging, and this is really to really bring it back to the beginning when you're thinking about how you want to rewrite your money blueprint for the new year.

Think about. Where you are avoiding money, where you're not taking charge of money. And really, so much of this, as I said, comes from the money programming that we have from our family of origin, from our parents. So think about it for yourself, like what money messages did you learn? From your parents, did you learn that spending is great?

There's just so much money you can spend and spend. Did you learn not to talk about money? Did you learn that debt is shameful? Like what did you learn about money? What do you believe about money? And ask yourself, are those current beliefs, are those current thoughts? Are they useful? Are they going to help you to build a big business, a thriving business?

Are they going to allow you. Whether it's energetically, emotionally, are they going to allow you to invest in your business? Do you have the wiring where you can like really like just hold off on your personal financial spending while you build your business and not get into scarcity? Not be frenetic, not be all wrapped up in your head that, oh my gosh, it's not happening fast enough.

Why isn't it working? How come everybody else's business is working and it's not my, it's not working for me. Like you really need to think about what is your current belief system around money? What are your current habits around money? Where are you on top of your money? Where are you avoiding money?

Are you investing for the future? Like that's really what you wanna look at. You wanna like come clean with your financial situation and choose one area or two areas. As I said, I once counted 21. Different areas of money, but is it your earning? Is it your investing in your long-term? You know, financial growth?

Is it investing in your business? Is it getting out of debt? Uns shaming debt. I recently did a podcast episode with Jermaine Foley where we talked all about her journey clearing $200,000. Of debt, and it's totally possible. It requires you to be more focused. It requires you to make some different choices and different decisions.

But if you find that right now you're just covering the basics or you're barely covering the basics, right? Maybe it's time for you to raise your prices. Maybe it's time for you to like reduce some of your spending in your personal life. And I wanna be very clear, I really do believe that the best way to grow your business is to continually invest in your business.

Since I started investing in my business. Through business coaching. That was probably 2015 or 2016, like a long time ago already. I have never been without a business coach. I have always made sure that I have a guide, someone who's been there before me, and I invest with like one business coach for a long.

For a long time, like three years or four years before I, you know, figured that it's time for me to go and learn something else. And I recently started like about a year ago with a new business coach, and I really see that she's going to be the one that I'm gonna stay with for the next four to five years because her approach matches, you know, my temperament, where I'm going, what I need to learn from her.

And this is what's so important, is really. Staying in it for the long term, not bouncing around from coach to coach, mentor to mentor, because there are people who know things and you can learn, you can drink from their wisdom. So don't bounce around, don't get frenetic. Don't say, oh, this isn't working. I'm gonna go try something else that's not working.

Let me do it this way. There is so much wisdom and growth, and then you can just be much more calm and more patient and much more focused when you stay with one approach for a long time. And so really that's what I have for you this week on the podcast as we go into the new Jewish year, as we know that we're gonna be standing before our king, we're gonna be crowning God, our king on Rosh Hashanah on the Jewish New Year.

We know that God is going to judge us and we just ask God to judge us for a good year, a sweet year. We ask God again and again to release the hostages that are remaining still in the hell holes of Gaza. There are still 47 hostages in Gaza and my heart like really breaks for them. It's been almost two years through going to plead with God that there is a good judgment.

For every single person in the world, especially for our hostages and people who are sick, and as you stand before your creator and you know that your creator, your king is going to be judging you for your sustenance, for your income, your money, as we say parnassa, just know that you are here to do your work as well, and this is the time when you're being called up to rewrite.

Your money blueprint as the CEO of your business in the new year. Alright, my friends, thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I wanna wish you a, you should be signed and sealed in the book of Life, and if you need some help I. Rewriting your Money Blueprint. I want you to go to my website, debbiesassen.com/mindset.

There is a Wealth Rewire workbook on my site. It's a new download, so go get this new download because it's time for you to rewrite your relationship with wealth, and I will see you next year. I will see you next week on the Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. Bye-bye for now.