Here's the Plan, Stan

It’s personal, of course—my becoming a rabid financial planning advocate for creative types.

As a writer, I am such a type. So are all my four younger siblings—an author/magazine editor, a chef/photographer, a painter/graphic designer, an illustrator/fashion stylist/production designer.

So, too, are many of my closest friends: film directors, copywriters, creative directors, art directors, cinematographers, poets, painters, editors, yoga teachers, musicians, entrepreneurs…The so-called right-brainers—creative, artistic, empathetic. Financially illiterate.  

After seeing many of these talented and gifted folks fall into debt, fall into depression because they weren’t making the movies they wanted to do, anxiously await the next project (or the next paycheck from the last freelance gig) and when in God’s name it was coming because their rent was three months overdue, work in patayan and kayod-kabayo fashion yet still barely make ends meet, earn P500,000 or so a month yet still can’t afford to take a much-needed year-long sabbatical, reluctantly ask for help from colleagues because they’ve been stricken by a critical illness and they have little or no savings nor medical/health insurance, I was, like, Shiyyyet.

I myself had gotten into debt for having the bright idea to self-publish my second book and for producing my third short film (flying in the entire Manila-based crew to Boracay, hello). Did I adequately plan for any of these passion projects? Noooo. Why not? I don’t knowww. It wasn’t taught in school or at home…?

What I do know is that this epidemic of grossly unsound money management and lack of financial foresight among creatives needs to stop.

Which is why I went into the financial services industry for a while--to learn and to teach to my kind the skill of smart money management. Otherwise known as Financial Planning.

Sure, it sounds fancy and rather scary (say it, Fffffinancial Planning), but all it means is identifying our goals and then figuring out how long and how much it’ll take us to get from where we are now to where we want to be.

Financial Planning is simply making the decision to see your dreams so clearly, to practically smell and touch and taste them, that you can already do concrete things today to move you closer to realizing these dreams, instead of leaving them up to the Fates.

I am convinced that if creative people learn the skill of financial planning, they will be unstoppable. They will themselves become producers, publishers, patrons/patronesses of the arts, philanthropists, investors in their colleagues’ work instead of waiting for the moneyed folks to hire them for the next uninspired, trite and, honestly, dumb project or idea.

Instead of bitching about the client who hasn’t paid them or whining that the government doesn’t support the arts enough, they will be making things happen (and I don’t mean burning down the client’s building or bombing Malacañang—tantalizing to some, but no. ‘Wag tayo ‘jan, guys. Not nice.)

They will channel their energy into more productive things: They will be creating world-class work.

While I originally wanted to be a financial planner for myself and for the people in the arts/creative industry, I was once again reminded in the course of this work—talking to people about their dreams—that there are people who don’t hold jobs that say “creative” and yet are actually so much more creative than those who have so-called creative jobs.

“Creative” is not a job—it’s a state of mind, “a way of showing up in the world,” as one guru put it. You can be an accountant, a lawyer, a software engineer—jobs that are categorized as  left-brained; that is, logical, linear, by-the-numbers--and yet you are actively and consciously shaping the life you’ve imagined for yourself, are waking up everyday excited by the full awareness that it is one day nearer to where you want to be. You are creating the one thing worth creating—the life you want to have, the life of your dreams. That is what it means to be creative.

The poet M.C. Richards couldn’t have put this sentiment more eloquently: “All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.”

Whether your goal is to build that “green” home (airy and awash with natural light to conserve energy), send your kids to the best universities, retire/live on interest comfortably at 60, create an annual travel fund, protect the money you’ve already made and ensure that the government doesn’t rob your heirs of what’s rightfully theirs, afford to take a year or two off to write the novel (or produce the film or volunteer in Tacloban or build that foundation) or all that and more, I urge you to get some serious money smarts. Now. Not later. 

Learn how to make your moolah become the solid, tangible foundation for your biggest dreams and your most towering aspirations. Today. Not tomorrow.  

I’ll sign off with this quote from our pal Pablo (yes, Picasso): “Our goals can only be reached through the vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”

So get crackin' and start plannin'. 

Live long and prosper, guys! :) 

Your ally and enabler,

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