Forefront’s Monday Market Update

What we can learn from making Sourdough bread.

My wife is a middle school Special Education Science teacher, so cooking in our house with the kids is always “an experiment”. Carefully measuring out ingredients, combining them in a specific order like the recipe tells us, and enjoying the end results together. So, of course over the past few months we waded into the growing trend of making sourdough bread.

If you have never made sourdough bread before, its isn’t combining ingredients, kneading and baking like I thought. It starts with making a sourdough bread “starter”. Basically, we grow yeast in a jar, and it takes about a week, but can stretch as long as two weeks. If we have decided to bake something delicious, I want to eat it right away! When I told the family this, Priya took this opportunity to remind me about how important it is to be patient, just like we tell her.

Drat, my own words have been used against me, I thought I had a few years before they became this smart!

Sourdough bread starter and building wealth starter

I won’t go through the entire recipe for the starter, but I will link it below. Needless to say, it took time and precision to get it right. Seeing the number of people who were also embarking on creating their own sourdough bread starter made me realize that people are absolutely willing to put in the time and dedication to something if the end results are worth it.

I can’t help but bring everything back to how I can use this knowledge to better help my clients and relate it to the journey we are all on building wealth. The hardest part about being patient and disciplined with your financial plan is that you aren’t gaining anything tangible at the end. You can’t touch wealth or hold financial security. It’s simply a feeling, one that has been described to me as the biggest sigh of relief anyone has ever felt. It is hard to understand how powerful this is unless you feel it yourself, so staying disciplined is hard.

Beginner Sourdough Starter Recipe

The fruits of your labor

Money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it does buy you freedom to control your time, and that is something tangible we can all feel, and probably do right now. I don’t change the oil in my car myself. I could watch a YouTube video, but it would take me hours. Instead, the fruits of my labor allow me to pay $60 dollars to have someone do it in under an hour.

Patience and discipline will yield incredible results when you need them, but understanding that when it comes to money, that time and discipline isn’t going to give you anything that you can touch or see. It is going to give you something that you feel, but it will be one of the most incredible feelings of freedom you will ever experience. The ability to do what you want, when you want, whenever you want is true wealth.

To listen more about the idea of Discipline = Freedom, and how to achieve that point of financial freedom, listen to episode 4 of Understanding the Power of Money. The link is below.

So What?

So how does this impact all of you?

• Try making Sourdough bread, it’s delicious
• Just like all good things, financial planning works best when given time
• Money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it does buy you freedom