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Tax refund, big payment or ignoring it altogether? My best strategies…

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Tax time here in the US is just around the corner and you are either excited to be expecting (or have already received) a refund, stressed about paying or perhaps you are ignoring it altogether.

You can e-mail into [email protected] to let me know which category you are in and I’ll hit you back with some guidance specific to your situation.

My personal tax story is instructive for you, no matter which category you fall into.

I’ll be sharing some details over right here, so keep an eye out for my tax time insights.  Most importantly, I’ll be sharing the story of how I ended up with an unexpected $100,000 tax bill and how I handled it. Plus, what I did after I was audited that built me a $1,000,000+ business. Seriously, this is huge and applies in many areas of your life.

Today though, I want to share some tax time tips that could help you immediately:

 

  1. Tax time can be a wake up call to approach your finances with eyes wide open: see it that way and grow your income in alignment with your life.

Looking at the numbers of my life and business was terrifying for years. Rather than paying attention (which felt either obsessive or overwhelming), I decided I would just make more money so I didn’t have to really pay attention.  

That’s one strategy I see a lot of entrepreneurs who are scared of their numbers using and while it can work for a while, it will ultimately backfire on you and result in extremely costly mistakes, as it did for me.

The other option I see people using is to just ignore tax time altogether by making so little that filing taxes isn’t necessary.

Either of these options is not in alignment with the truth of who you are. Making so little that filing taxes isn’t necessary or making so much that you think you can just pay in advance for your mistakes are both avoidance strategies that take you away from the truth.

Face your taxes with eyes wide open, with regular monthly meetings with your bookkeeper (or yourself if you don’t have a bookkeeper yet), reconcile your books, categorize your expenses properly each month, and review your profit and loss — those are recipes for success.

If you don’t know how to do these things, hit reply and let us know. If there’s enough interest we’ll create a training.

There was a time I didn’t know how to do these things, so I just avoided it.  

Today, I have clean and clear systems to manage my financials that allow me to look clearly, use my numbers to tell the story of my business so I can make wise decisions and I can relax knowing I’m earning what I need, when I need it, on demand and there’s no tax time scrambling anymore.

 

  1. Use your refund wisely to invest in resources that create more in the world.

The other day, I supported one of my on-site team members to get his taxes done. He was going to go to H&R Block and they told him it would cost him $100 to do his taxes plus he would owe $300+ (because he is a 1099 independent contractor with us and that means he has to pay all of the taxes himself on his income).

I used Turbo Tax and deducted some of his expenses for him. We ended up getting him a $300+ refund from the taxes he paid via his W-2 job.

So I asked him, how are you going to use this money?

He told me he was going to buy parts for his car so he could make it even more tricked out.

A part of me cried inside. That’s consumerism at it’s finest.

Investing in tricking out his car isn’t going to create more of anything in his life or the world.

Instead, he could be using the money to invest in gaining a new skill that he will be able to use in service to creating more in the world.

I invite you right now to consider where you might be using your resources to consume more rather than to create more and what you can do to shift that with your very next investment, especially your tax time refund, if you are getting one.

 

  1. Don’t beat yourself up, rather commit to make changes and learn, grow and evolve.

Remember, we learn by making mistakes. Every challenge (including the challenge of managing the financials of your life with your eyes wide open) is your greatest opportunity to be more of who you really are. And you get to choose that in each moment.

Don’t beat yourself up. Trust that you are being shown exactly what you need to learn next. Our purpose here at Eyes Wide Open is to lovingly support you to see what you may have been missing up until now.

I hope these tax time tips have showed you how you can use even the most practical of life experiences to expand your consciousness and live your life awake, aware and on your terms.

With eyes and heart wide open,

Ali

 

PS — We started our Enough Course yesterday, April 6th. Everyone who attended had huge ah-ha’s and breakthroughs on their own awareness of what they have and what they actually need to have the life they really want. It’s not too late to join us for the rest of the sessions. If you would like to consider whether it’s right for you, send us a note ([email protected]) and let us know so we can send you a recording of the first session and you can check it out and see if it’s your right next step.

4 Questions to Liberate Your Fear of Credit and Debt

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Recently, I shared 5 main archetypes of fear around credit and debt.

Which one or combination of these do you find yourself most aligned with?

Whichever it is, you can likely feel it is this thread of fear that is keeping you from accessing all of the resources you need to create the life you are meant to live.

Your fear is rational. It is pointing to the truth that you have not been properly educated about how to best use the resources you do have available to you.

We have made mistakes. We have created extraordinary stress in our lives, born from the idea of not-enoughness.

We have decided that our failures define us and we must either be punished for them (if we have made poor choices in the past) or that we must not make them in the first place (if we have avoided loss up until now).

But there is a greater truth here and your feelings about credit and debt can be a beautiful pointer to your next stage of awakening.

This is why Eyes Wide Open exists; to help you see where how you show up in life and business is your path to awakening.

If you are afraid to access credit and debt, whether due to past mistakes, lack of experience or just general fear of doing it wrong, and…

you DO have dreams that would express in the world, if you had access to capital….

Your next step is to come to a deeper level of awareness so you can learn, grow and evolve.

Awareness begins with an understanding of where you are compromising your life for and because of money.

1. Ask yourself: where have you and do you continue to make choices that are guided by the belief (real or false) of not having enough?

The second step is to dive deep into clarity around how you would live, work and play if money was available as easily as knowing what you desired and it was the fuel for those desires, not the compass telling you where you can and cannot go.

2. Ask yourself: if I had [insert amount of money that represents freedom to you], how would I use it to create more good in my life and the world?

The third step is to mine the gifts of your mistakes (or your fear of making a mistake in the future) and remember that we learn through making mistakes.

Mistakes are our greatest teachers, when we open to the impact of these mistakes, welcome the pain of having made them and appreciate the learning that results.

When we contract in shame or self-punishment was a result of our mistakes, we miss the opportunity to learn, grow and evolve through them.

3. Ask yourself: what have I learned from the mistakes I have made or witnessed when it comes to credit and debt? 

The final step in the process of using credit and debt to fuel your own awakening, so you are no longer a slave to the mid-guided idea of not enough, is to consider what would have to be true for you to confidently access all the resources you need to live the life you are truly meant to live.

4. Ask yourself: What must I do next to trust myself to use my resources in the highest and best way possible?

When you complete this process, you may discover that your next step is to clarify: What is the life you truly want? What do you truly need to have that life? What are the resources you already have? With that clarity you can determine whether using credit and debt makes sense for you.

Maybe you will even discover that your next step is to learn more about how to access and use credit and debt wisely.

Perhaps you will begin to see that it’s time to awaken yourself from the slumber that keeps so many stuck as slaves to a system, born not from any external perpetrator but the perpetration we impose on ourselves by not facing our fear and moving through it.

Wherever you are on the path, I welcome you. I invite you to the next stage of your awakening. I offer my hand in service to you  to use these oh so practical areas of life, money, work, credit and debt to be the foundational work of your next level of spiritual awakening.

I’ll be hosting a free class soon to support you here. Dates are being chosen now.

I’m curious what a class that helps you face and move through your fears around credit and debt so you can access everything you need to have the life you want would be worth to you.

Send me a reply ([email protected]) and let me know. I am just in the process of designing and pricing the class and I want it to be accessible, yet at the same time priced high enough for it to be a motivational stretch. 

Yours in love,
Ali

Your Rational Fear About Debt and Credit, and How It Can Liberate You Now

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Since my recent message about the bad advice about credit and debt that is keeping you stuck and my request for your stories, I am seeing some common themes emerge.

You are afraid to use credit and debt. You don’t trust yourself to use it wisely. And you don’t trust others to make good choices with it.

This fear causes contraction and, in many cases, is keeping you from accessing the resources you need to live the life you are truly here to live.

There are 5 main fear archetypes I am seeing.

1. You have made poor choices with money, specifically the use of credit, in the past and you are sure that you will do it again;

2. You have protected your credit score for years and you are afraid that if you do use credit and debt, you’ll make poor choices that put this sign of your “goodness” at risk.

3. I’m also seeing some who have not even dared get near it, don’t even know if they have a credit score and have decided that the financial system generally is an evil best avoided.

4. On the flip side, and the least vocal, are those who have leveraged credit and debt successfully to build companies and lives, but may secretly feel some shame that they couldn’t do it without taking on debt.

5. Last, and in the smallest group, are those who know they want to use credit and debt wisely, but don’t even know where to begin.

The rational fear underlying all of these is that you want to make sure you do it right. This is your business. Your life. Your and your family’s well being.

That’s exactly why it’s time to open your eyes, get educated about the effective and responsible use of debt, and make the best choice for you.

Which of these 5 archetype groups do you find yourself in?

Send me an e-mail ([email protected]) and let me know. And if you have not already told me your credit and debt story and what you would do with $50k loaned to you at zero percent interest for a year, please share that in your reply too.

I’ll be back with 4 questions that will liberate you from your fear around credit and debt and guide you to your next steps.

With love and beyond,

Ali

The Bad Advice About Credit That’s Kept You Stuck

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I’m a little riled up as I write this.

I’m part of a private Facebook group and someone posted a request for guidance about taking out a business loan to support the next evolution of her business.

The immediate response she got back from 4 people was don’t take out loans for your business, don’t go into debt, and no debt = freedom.

This is the exact thinking that keeps so many people, maybe you, stuck in work they don’t love, chasing false financial freedom and wondering why they don’t have the lives they want.

Debt is not the source of your slavery.

Credit is a gift.

Used wisely, it can and will finance your learning, growth and evolution. And it can support you to create far more in the world than you can without resources.

In fact, part of the reason most of our country’s wealth is captured and held by the 1% while the rest get poorer and poorer is because we’ve been conditioned into focusing on saving instead of on leveraging debt and other resources to invest in ourselves and creating more wisely.

If you would love support with accessing credit and using it wisely, hit reply and let us know. We’re currently planning our next training on accessing and using credit with joy and we would love to know your biggest questions about this topic.

To your eyes wide open life,

Ali

PS — Tell me your story of using credit and being in debt by hitting reply so I can help you take your next steps beyond fear and conditioning. Better yet, give this one some thought and then tell me what came through: if you had access to $50,000 of credit at 0% for a year, how would you use it? What would you invest in? What would you create?

Package Your Services: You are priceless

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Hey y’all,

I just got off a training with my members on Pricing and Packaging your services.

We’re creating ease of enrollment and wanted to offer you some of the juicy parts. Why? Because it is the #1 thing I repeatedly see most people in service-based businesses are missing the boat on and was the 1st step toward building my professional practice into a million dollar business.

#1. Be really clear about who you serve. Most business owners start off in business trying to serve way too big of an audience.

My law practice took off big time when I narrowed my focus to serving families with young children and was able to become the go to lawyer in my community by educating families with young children in a way no other lawyers were doing at that time. I later expanded to serving business owners with young children at home, when I began offering legal services for business.

Up until I narrowed my focus, I struggled to get clients in the door and when I did, they often had to think about whether to hire me or were shopping around. Once I narrowed my focus and designed my service to meet their needs, I became unshoppable.

 

#2. Drop the free initial consultation and instead create a first meeting that provides tremendous value, has a name, and a specific purpose or outcome.

No one really values a free initial consultation and it’s most often seen as a sales meeting in which people really just want to know how much you charge so they can shop you.

When you shift away from the free initial consult and instead create a meeting that has a name, a purpose, and a value, your ideal clients want it, value it and whether they hire you or not, will tell all their friends and family about you.

Plus, you’re delivering value right from the start and when this meeting is done well and you prepare your prospects for it well, they aren’t focused on price, they are focused on the outcome of the meeting.

Make this meeting so awesome that you could charge for it and people would be happy to pay, but see below for how to use it in your marketing by offering it for free or discounted.

 

#3. Use your marketing to educate, educate, educate and give people an easy way to get your now named and highly valuable initial meeting for free or at a significant discount.

For example, if I served folks one-to-one, I would offer a pricing and packaging strategy session or Money Map Life and Income Planning Session at the end of this message, either at a discount or free, depending on how many new clients I wanted and where I was in my practice.

#4. Make a list of all the services you can possibly provide to your ideal clients by focusing on the problems they solve using outcome based language.

I see too many people trying to offer their services in terms of time or number of sessions (3-hours or 4 sessions) rather than in terms of the outcome provided.

Your pricing should be based on the value of the outcome you provide to the people you serve, not at all based on the number of hours or sessions it takes to get there.

#5. Base your fees (at least in the beginning) on the LEAST you can charge, rather than buying into some idea of charging what you are worth.

You are priceless.

You couldn’t possibly charge what you are worth, even if you tried. What you can do though is charge what you need so you aren’t sacrificing your life in service to your work AND once you’ve got confidence with your enrollment structure (which will happen quickly if you follow my guidance here) and your practice is full or close to full, you can increase your package fees based on the true value you are providing to the people you serve.

In order to ensure that you are not under-charging for your services while at the same time knowing the least you can charge, make sure you understand your Money Map Numbers at five levels — min to be happy, min to be of service, preferred, no limits, and now — so you know what you are working towards.

These numbers are calculated based on the life you want to have, what it will cost to have that life at your next number, the amount of time you have to earn in exchange for your services — which is less than you probably think given all the other things you need to do in your business.

If you found this helpful, check out our Money Map Life Planning Series. You can get it here.

Does your business need a LIFT?

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Today’s love letter is all business.

March 15 is the deadline for you to elect S-Corporation status for 2016 for your LLC or Corporation.

This is an important determination because it allows you to pay yourself a salary via payroll (thereby giving you a W-2 as if you worked for a company) and to only pay self employment taxes on the part of your income that is your salary.

If you have an LLC and do not elect S-Corporation status, you pay self-employment taxes on all of your income!

This could add up to a several thousand dollar difference for you come tax time next year.

If you need support with getting your legal, insurance, financial and tax systems set up, you may want to consider our LIFT Foundation System + Toolkit.

The LIFT Foundation System covers issues like:

  • How to incorporate your business
  • How to maintain your business entity
  • How to protect your intellectual property
  • How to set up your team members properly
  • How to get legal agreements in place
  • What types of insurance you need
  • How to set up your financial systems
  • How to save loads of money on your taxes

You can read about the full system here.

Your investment in the system gets you the education + the agreements + the implementation maps you need to get your legal, insurance, financial and tax systems in place and will easily save you tens of thousands of dollars on taxes, ensuring you don’t get sued, and that your business is LIFTed with the foundation you need for success.

Whether you get the LIFT System or not, please make sure you’ve got the right legal entity in place to protect your personal assets and ensure you don’t overpay on your taxes.

The LIFT System comes with 60 days of Eyes Wide Open membership AND if you are one of the next 5 people to enroll and pay in full in either the digital OR deluxe versions before March 12 (to give you time to make the deadline to file for your S-Election), I’m going to get on the phone with you personally to answer your questions about legal, insurance financial and tax systems in your business.

If you have any questions about whether this System is the next best step for your business, hit reply and let us know. We are always here to support you in making Eyes Wide Open investments in your next evolution.

Love beyond,

Ali

PS — having the wrong tax setup in my business cost me over $100,000 back in 2006. I created the LIFT Foundation System so this wouldn’t have to happen to anyone else. You can hear that story plus several more in my presentation here + get a coupon code for an immediate $500 discount on the LIFT Foundation System:

http://www.myliftfoundation.com

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