By Daniel Rodriguez | Dr. Budgets

Life is short. Recently, I have been in a reflective mood because that has become very apparent to me. I started thinking about my life and whether I was living it the way I truly intended. The Dr. Budgets tagline is Spend Wisely. Live Wealthy.™, so I started thinking about it in terms of spending my time wisely to live wealthy because time is finite, and you can run out of it at any moment. Dr. Budgets takes a lot of my time, and I asked myself “Is it time well spent? Why am I doing this?” After much reflection, it turns out that I have a true passion for what I do, so I dug a little deeper to figure out why. Why am I so passionate about what we do at Dr. Budgets? I could help people in a variety of ways, so why money coaching?

The story of why I am so passionate about what I do for others through Dr. Budgets starts with why I do it for myself. My parents were divorced when I was very young, so I never knew anything different than having divorced parents. From the time I started school, I would be with one parent during the week and the other during the weekends, and every so often it would switch, which meant I would then switch schools (1^st grade with my dad, 2^nd-4^th grade with my mom, etc.). When I was 12 and heading into 7^th grade, my dad ran into hard financial times… his business failed, so money became very tight. My mom wasn’t making very much either, but she made it work while she was attending school at UCSD. To make ends meet, my dad decided to move to Rosarito, Mexico, which meant that for 7^th grade I was going to switch schools again, but now to a different country. We also moved to a very poor part of town, so the house we lived in had no hot water (bathing in the winter was torture), broken windows, and was bug infested. Luckily, we always had food, but sometimes it was rice, beans, and tortillas several days in a row. This transition was very hard for me as a 12-year-old boy, and I would look forward to going to my mom’s house on the weekends… a house with first world amenities, like hot showers! After I finished 7^th grade, my dad moved to Tijuana, Mexico where I attended 8^th and 9^th grades. The place in Tijuana was in an even poorer neighborhood (we now lived in an RV on somebody else’s property and used an outhouse). Those were the hardest three years of my life, and I believe those years shaped the view I have of money and the world to this day.

I realized that the reason I choose to spend my money wisely is so that I never end up in the same financial predicament as my dad. Being free of debt and having money in the bank gives me comfort and the freedom to live how I choose to live, and it means that I (or my kids) never have to live the way I did for those three years. I carry that same passion for finances to my clients because I want them to have the freedom to choose how they want to live, and to never have to face the type of decision my dad had to make. I see so many people who are slaves to their jobs because they are living paycheck-to-paycheck. I want to change this so that they feel like they have a choice to be whom they want to be and do what they want to do.

Life is too short to live otherwise, so that is why I started Dr. Budgets.

That is why every person who transforms their habits because of the money coaching they receive equals a better life for them, and maybe also for their children. Which means their children will never go through what I went through.

So that is why I do what I do. Why do you do what you do? I would love to hear your story. Please share it with me in the comments section below! If you know someone who is ready to improve their spending habits, please have them contact us today. Thanks for reading!