Welcome to Built by Margin, the podcast where strategy meets the spreadsheet. I'm your host, Laurie Chen, fractional CFO and tax strategist, here to help you make smarter financial decisions, build a profitable business, and keep more of what you earn. Let's dive into the numbers that actually move the needle. Welcome to Built by Margin, episode 13. Today I'm excited to share some insights from my upcoming book, Riskworthy. What does it mean to become your best self in health and in finances? Making decisions that are in alignment with your best possible self is risk-worthy. If the decision, despite the uncertainties or the downsides, leads to the best version of yourself, then the short-term and even long-term costs are worth taking on. Most of our decisions are dominated by the thinking of quantitative return on investment, but our decisions should be based on qualitative return on investment. Will the intangible benefits of the decision you make be valuable to you and your personal growth? An important truth is that you yourself are not static. You're changing and opening the growth. You and your identity experience different versions and iterations over time. You're not the same person today that you were one year ago, and definitely not 10 years ago. You will not be the same person today that you will be one year from now. The truth is that you must activate the best version of yourself if you are making decisions that are risk worthy. Becoming the best version of yourself requires self-awareness, discipline, and commitment in all areas of life, health, finances, relationships, career, and entrepreneurship. Let's talk about health. I didn't become the best version of myself until I decided that I would be intentional about my health and fitness. The importance of health and fitness has been underestimated, not in and of itself, but as it relates to other areas of our lives. Can you really be successful at finances, relationships, career, or business if you're not intentional or disciplined enough about your most important asset in life, which is your body? Growing up, I was active and played sports recreationally and competitively well into my 30s. However, life, relationships, career, business got in the way of making the fittest version of myself a priority. One day, I decided to weigh myself and realized that I was at 175 pounds, almost 20 pounds over my ideal weight for my height. I realized how much I'd slid into the less than best version of myself. In August of 2024, I lost my first dog, Amos, to colon cancer, and my church pastor of many years to cancer. These life events forced me to reevaluate my commitment to my health and motivated me to invest even more into myself by eating better and exercising better. The productivity hack that I used to stay committed was to write down my commitment onto a physical calendar, put it next to my working desk, and mark it off when I completed it. This worked well because it forced me to see my commitment go on a daily and monthly basis in a visual format. In order to become the best version of yourself in health and fitness, you have to be intentional and set up your environment in a way that will make it fun for you to do it every day. There's some other things I did to make sure that my goals were successful. Because I enjoy variety, I went to two different gyms five to seven times a week. And I generally went in the evenings after work because it helped me relieve stress from my workday. You might be a morning person and want to work out earlier, but I chose a rhythm that fit my body and my mind the best, and it worked great. I figured if I'm able to invest in monthly subscriptions like Netflix, Amazon Prime, pay for life coaching, or therapy, or whatever else I spend my discretionary money on, then I should be making monthly investments into gym memberships that I actually go to. In addition to working on my fitness daily, I made some substantial changes to my diet and nutrition that helped my overall health. After just four to six months of consistent changes, cardio workouts, and strength training, I was already starting to see and feel real results. And I absolutely enjoyed going too. What used to be obligatory became fun after making it a commitment. One year later, I had doubled my strength capacity, increased my endurance, and hit the weight loss goal that I was targeting all year. Deciding to become the best version of myself led to visible changes in my body, but it was a lot of discipline and commitment to become that person. Now let's talk finances. Becoming your best self in finances means actively tracking your financial metrics, like monthly income, monthly expense, and personal net worth. It also generally means not taking on bad debt, like the kind you put on high-interest credit cards. If you are actively tracking key financial metrics in your personal finances, then you're much more prepared to take on personal and life risks in a responsible way. As someone with a finance and accounting background, I was always adequate with numbers and tracking them. But what I realized early on is that it's not exactly about tracking the numbers and arrears. When I started tracking the numbers in a forward looking way, that's when I could really become strategic about my personal and financial decisions and what risks I could take on despite the downsides. I reviewed my spending every month and even set a budget for myself. What I found was even more useful was building a forward-looking forecast of my income, spending, and personal net worth for the next three to five years. I built it out month by month and could see exactly where I was heading financially if I made a specific investment decision or did not hit a particular financial goal. A lot of businesses do this type of monthly and yearly forecasting work. I just decided to apply the same concept to my own financial life. I also built a personal cash runway model when I started my business initially with no guaranteed income and when there were seasonal dips due to client changes or market conditions. If you're not financially savvy, I recommend that you hire a financial planner or a financial coach to help you set up the systems for you so that you can track your numbers appropriately. Of course, the best version of yourself in personal finances is having maximum net worth, absolutely no debt, and multiple income streams. But most of us are not there yet. So then making decisions that are risk worthy require knowledge of how your current decisions will impact your financial future in the next three to five years. If you're proactively tracking the financial impact of your decisions, then you are actively becoming the best version of yourself. I hope you found today's insights helpful and that you will subscribe and share this podcast, Built by Margin. Sign up for book updates at www.riskworthy.co. Stay tuned for more announcements coming up. Thanks for tuning in to Built by Margin. If you're ready to turn insights into income, subscribe and join me each week as we break down the numbers behind smart business growth. I'm