I’m excited to have Diana Crabtree Green on the show! Diana is a CPA with more than twenty years of experience in personal finance and taxes. She’s also the creator of Buck the Budget™. Clients come to Diana with many of the same concerns: they don’t know where their money goes and they need help getting ahead. In her personal life, she has long prioritized building wealth quickly while also streamlining her own record-keeping. (Diana says, “accountants don’t actually want to track their expenditures either”).
Buck the Budget™ is a culmination of her simple techniques which have allowed herself and others to efficiently accumulate wealth and more easily manage money.
Her platform is an easy three-step money management program that gives users clarity of their cash flows, freedom from daily tracking, & a monthly money tune-up. Buck the Budget™ was created to help their users get ahead… finally!
Below are some insights from Diana Crabtree Green. Enjoy!
What is your personal definition of success?
Simply? Financial independence and financial freedom. Having this opens doors for SO MUCH more in life – options to operate as you want to. I have a pretty good handle on this personally, and it’s my mission to help others succeed in the same way.
But to this end, I value progress and getting ahead in all areas of life, not just financially. I’m talking about forward progress with the things I do. This includes running, which is an easy example of “getting ahead”. But also rock climbing, raising a teenager, launching a business, working through tax season.
With all of this in mind, I define success as each and every accomplishment along the path to getting ahead.
Delivering a speech = SUCCESS!
Saving and buying my first car when I was 16 = SUCCESS!
Making a contribution to your 401(k) or Roth IRA = SUCCESS!
Completing a tax return = SUCCESS!
Making progress to a new high point on a route I’m trying to climb = SUCCESS!
Can you share the steps you take daily to improve?
To start, I make my bed first thing every day. SUCCESS! 🙂 It seems silly, but it’s a good start to accomplish something right out of the gate.
I’m a stickler for checklists. I set out each day with what I want to accomplish and in order of priority. I prefer to get the bigger more critical tasks done first, so that I may reward myself later with easier sometimes personal tasks, or even free time! All of this allows me to push forward and get the necessary work done each day. This work, especially when spent growing a business which is where most of my work lately is spent, all leads to improvement.
What is your advice for someone making an important decision?
Consult with your most important advisor groups:
* Your trusted inner circle – the people who believe in you and truly have your best interests at heart, and
* Your values – Are you making a decision that will benefit you NOW or LATER? Are you satisfying a need for immediacy, and at what cost (security)? Is this a want or a need?
* Your body – your gut, heart, and head will all have opinions, often conflicting, about what to do. Listen to them all, but remember that your head is always the wisest one of the group.
Tell me about a specific moment that set you on the path you’re on now?
I met a new client many years back who was (and still is) much my junior – she’s more than ten years younger than me. When we met, I had already dropped to working part-time and seasonally – work for tax accountants is concentrated in the Feb-Apr time period. In talking with her about my (really great!) life balance and work as a CPA – she looked at me starry-eyed and asked: “will you be my financial planner?” With that,
