The School Of Cash Flow

While many claim that money is what runs the world, money is actually just energy—a piece of paper that represents an agreed-upon value. Money doesn’t do anything; it’s people and their decisions that do it. In this episode, Sara Bronson of Amani Financial Services discusses how to make more informed choices with money. Sara discusses new money management strategies for achieving financial freedom and closing the wealth gap. With her background in financial literacy, accounting, and personal financial struggles, she shares practical tips and tricks for building long-term wealth and improving your financial situation. From budgeting to investing, Sara explores key strategies that anyone can implement to take control of their finances and achieve their financial goals. Join us for an insightful conversation on how to build a more financially secure future for yourself and your loved ones.

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Closing The Wealth Gap: Money Management Strategies For Financial Freedom With Sara Bronson

This episode is going to have a different flavor now. Most of my guests are mainly real estate investing-focused. This episode is still related to the topic of money and cashflow but from a different perspective. We will be talking about money, finances, and healthy relationship with money as a whole. My guest is Sara Bronson, the Founder and CEO of Amani Financial LLC, a company that empowers small business owners to build profitable businesses and close the wealth gap.

With over 30 years of experience in the field, Sara has become an expert in financial literacy. Personally, overcoming her struggles with money by combining her accounting skills with the habits of financially successful people, Sara developed new money management strategies that enabled her to pay off her debt and purchase a home in less than seven years.

She’s passionate about making the conversation around money more inclusive and accessible. She believes that financial literacy is essential to closing the wealth gap and promoting financial independence. As that being said, I’m excited to have her on the show. Welcome to the show, Sara. How are you?

I am great and thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and I’m excited to see where the conversation goes. I have to say that I have been reading your show and the value that you bring with each and every guest is so inspiring I get something out of every conversation you have had. I’m delighted to be here and see what comes up.

From the reader to the guest. For those of you reading right now, you never know. You might be a guest. Just for a point in reference, where are you based geographically for my audience that may not know you yet?

I am in Sonoma, California, so I’m north of you.

I’m in San Ramon. You are a little bit over an hour away from me. When I was reading about you and your bio, one of the things I wanted to start with is this concept of the wealth gap. What does that mean?

There is a wealth gap based on your demographics and where we grew up, not only geographically but what are our cultural demographics. The divide between the haves and the have-nots is getting bigger and bigger, as we know. In order for us to have a bigger voice in our community and to have a seat at the table, we need to have access to financial resources and be able to manage them so that we can grow our wealth, we can create generational wealth, and also can have better purchasing power, and have a bigger say at the table. Whatever table that is, you need to be able to get there.

I think that the niche you are in, financial literacy and financial education, are very important. A lot of the folks who read this are real estate investors, but just important in general because they don’t teach too much about it in schools. I don’t know what your educational background is. I’m curious to know what your overall story was to get to where you are now, where you are helping people become financially literate. I could tell you are very passionate about it. Tell me more about your background.

I grew up in the Midwest. I’m one of a large family. I’m one of ten kids, and my dad was an entrepreneur and he did very well, and my grandfather was an entrepreneur. This entrepreneurial spirit is ingrained in my DNA, but we had a pretty good life. I asked about money as a young child and I was told by my parents, “Don’t worry about money. Get a good education.” That was always very important in my family and Midwest White family values. “Get a good education, go to college, find a man, and he will take care of you. You raise a family and have a great life.” That was before the mid-’60s hit when the women’s liberation and civil rights movements were growing and opportunities and social mores were changing.

As my older brothers and sisters came back from college, things changed. “You didn’t need a man to take care of you. You could go out into the world.” That superwoman syndrome. I graduated college without the husband and armed to take on the world. I got into the IT industry and the accounting field very early on and was helping small business owners migrate from manual books to the new automated computer systems.

We were doing great service for our clients, but because I didn’t have that financial literacy or education, I was bankrupt in a few short years. We were doing great stuff. We had cashflow, but I wasn’t watching profitability. My bankruptcy lawyer gave me the very best advice and said, “Go model your behavior after wealthy people and figure out what they do and change your habits and behavior.”

I listened and I did that. I happened to be in the IT industry. I was able to make more money and cash is king as we know, and I was able to pay off bankruptcy and buy my home as a single woman from all that. After I bought that home, I was getting ready to remodel it. In 2008 I was signing up for a remodeling loan. This was the time of the mortgage credit crisis, and I’d been negotiating with a mortgage broker for a 30-year fixed.

I knew the numbers and what I could handle. I wasn’t trying to take more money out of the house. That was the conversation at the time was, “Get more money out. Your payments are going to be lower because of arms and things like that.” I was ready to sign on the dotted line and I distinctly remember on my way to work, that mortgage broker called me and said, “We are not going to do that 30-year fixed. I have got a great product for you. It’s going to get you more out of the house. It’s going to save you some money. It will be great.”

I wasn’t smart about things then, but I knew enough about the numbers where it didn’t add up. I didn’t want to take more out of the house. I didn’t want an adjustable rate, so I canceled that relationship and went and got a 30-year fixed, and I didn’t lose my house when the market crashed. I moved to California in 2008 and 2009, and the job I came for was lost when things changed and I didn’t know what to do.

I also went to school and got certified as a life coach. I hung my accounting shingle and that business took off right away. As a coach listening with a new ear, as I was presenting financial statements to my clients who were small business owners, I watched the terror come over them as I was presenting the numbers and they are wondering, “How does it look? How many mistakes have I made? Is it good or is it bad?” From there, I started to do more research and started to understand the relationship between our emotional, financial relationship and that practical relationship and why the two of them are important.

It looks like you took to heart everything that bankruptcy attorney had said to model wealthy folks and what their habits are like. Who did you end up modeling? Was it people in your circles or did you have to find people outside that you didn’t know?

Both. I had family members. I watched them use technology to reconcile their bank account, manage their finances, understand how much they were putting away for investments, and manage their taxes. I also had a prior boss who worked in acquisitions in divestitures and I went and spoke with him. A lot of folks in my circle either had business relationships or I had personal relationships who would talk to me.

That’s also the challenge with money, are we haven’t been very comfortable talking about it with each other. I find that the more we can be comfortable sharing that information, the more we inspire each other, or anytime there’s a conversation, you learn something new. Whether it’s investing, saving, or taxes, I want to help make this conversation of money much more mainstream than it is now.

Some families and cultures seem to be more okay with talking about money and others are not so much. Do you have an opinion as to where initial feelings or habits around money are for? Do you think it starts as a kid by watching parents, or is it something else? I’m only asking this because even in my own family, a lot of my family is not necessarily good with money. I have always been good with saving money because I grew up that we didn’t have anything. I always knew that I was a good saver from the beginning, but I can’t say that for all my family. Do you have any opinions of where people are forming their habits about their relationship with money?

I do and it’s one of the topics we cover in the workshops I have developed called the Amani Money Method, and you are spot on and it’s a fascinating conversation. It’s more fun the more diverse group that we are talking amongst.

Is it in terms of culture or what are we talking about?

Culture, race, gender, and age. The more diverse we can have it, I will share a little story that I think you will find interesting. It begins with when did we first understand there was this thing called money, and then where did we get that education? Early childhood educators will tell you that you developed most of your beliefs by age five based on your experiences, and depending on how you grew up and where you grew up, and I’m 1 of 10.

Ten of us got a little bit of different information about money based on what we heard and where the family was at that time. Whether you were male or female, whether the family was doing well or not, or did you have a single-parent home? That’s where once we start to explore my beliefs about money because our beliefs drive our decisions. What we show on paper and the flow on paper is one thing and we can use that to make decisions, but there’s also that emotional relationship with money that drives our decisions.

Money Management Strategies: Our emotional relationship with money also drives our decisions.

Back to this conversation of where we get our beliefs about money. Something I will share that I find very interesting is when I have these workshops and talk to my attendees. If it’s a short workshop, we start with talking and doing a Q&A on the practical. The inflow, the outflow, when do I hire, and all those kinds of things.

Then I will ask and share that I have these exercises I want to do that are more about the emotional relationship with money, and do they prefer to go practical or go emotional? In my small test groups, 100% of the time, it’s the men that pipe up quickly and say, “Go emotional.” From there, the floodgates open and we have a powerful conversation.

What are the differences between practical and emotional relationships with money? What questions do you ask on the practical side versus the emotional side?

The practical side is what I call learning the language of money. I’m working primarily with business owners, but this translates to our homes as well, our economy. It’s knowing what’s our income or revenue, what’s our expenses and how we spend or share our money. How are we choosing to spend and in what categories do those align with our priorities in life? Are we even paying attention to what our priorities are, and then how are we spending our money to support those priorities?

There’s the balance sheet side of the equation. The profit and loss statement is a language. The balance sheet is a language and they are tied together, and the balance sheet talks about assets and liabilities. The assets are what do you own? What can you turn to cash? Whom do you owe? Then the equity is what’s left over.

You might be using assets to buy some liabilities. You might be using some cash to buy a home. You might be using some cash to invest in or have a loan that will allow you to buy and invest in your business, whatever you need to grow, whether it’s equipment, space, team, or whatever it is. That’s the practical side is understanding the numbers and how those numbers impact us for saving, investing, minimizing our tax liability, preparing for buying real estate, or whatever it is.

When people go for a mortgage, what’s one of the things that you are asked for? It’s your financial statements. That’s the practical side. The emotional side is how am I making financial decisions? Am I not taking that next step because I’m worried about pennies or am I not taking that next step because I’m worried about things that don’t even relate to the challenges that I might have ahead? Sometimes what I find is that people think small and think that they are saving themselves money because they don’t make a particular investment. If you’d make that investment, the returns would make you 2 or 3 times more money than that little amount you are saving by not moving forward.

Money Management Strategies: Some people think they’re saving themselves money by not making a particular investment. When you make that investment, the returns would make you two- or three-times more money than that little amount you’re saving by not moving forward.

That does make sense because I feel like I’m on the emotional side. A lot of the decisions made over there might be stemming from fear, maybe like the scarcity mindset versus the abundance mindset. We talked about these kinds of things. I get that. Sometimes people get paralyzed that they won’t have enough. They get paralyzed. It’s hard to make money decisions and whatnot. How do people overcome stuff like that? A good business decision can be made by spending money upfront that will be paying twenty-fold down the line. How do you coach people to get out of that fear and scarcity mindset?

It’s twofold and part of it is having that conversation of what are their beliefs about money. What are their fears? What you brought up is so spot on in fear of not-enoughness. I have interviewed people on both ends of the economic spectrum, whether you are making very little money or whether you are making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A similar emotional relationship with money is true is not-enoughness. Will I have enough when I need it? If you are on the lower end of the spectrum, you are always feeling like there’s never enough and will I ever catch up. People who also make a lot of money, there often are those fears. When you make a lot of money, you have a lot of responsibilities. You have got to have a team around you. You need to spend that money in order to minimize your taxes.

There are lots of things you have to think about. If you are managing a big team or maybe you have got family members and other folks who are relying on you, there’s always that concern about, “Will I have enough when I need it,” or when someone in my circle needs it. Doing the emotional work and having these conversations where we uncover, how did you get your beliefs about money? What are your beliefs about money? Then opening up an abundant mindset.

There are all kinds of exercises that we can do on a daily basis in group settings around gratitude and how we see things. How we speak about money is super important. If we are always talking about, “I don’t have. It’s going to cost too much,” or those kinds of things, that’s constricting energy. Can you feel it when we speak about it?

You want to be able to speak about money and be grateful when the bills walk in the door that you have the money to pay it. Look forward to whatever it is that you want. Looking forward to the day that you have the money to be able to purchase that instead of always thinking, “I will never be in that mode.”

Money is almost like a flow of energy when you think about it. Do you agree? That’s how I see it as well. It’s like what you think and what you believe you will attract. I feel like that’s what you are teaching.

I consider money to be energy. It’s a piece of paper and it represents an agreed-upon value. You and I both agree that a dollar is a dollar. How we value a dollar might be very different from our circumstances, but money needs to flow in it is just energy. Think about where it came from. It developed out of the barter system, and then societies grew to a point where the barter system was not manageable.

Now we have this monetary representation of value and how we exchange things. It is very much energy in my world. The way that we exchange it, the gratitude, the abundance mindset, and the belief that it’s flowing and that it will flow to me as long as I open up and I’m receptive to it, it does flow that way but we have to be open to it. Like attracts like. The one thing I will say is that someone taught me this early on and I believe it wholeheartedly. Do money’s number one job is?

I don’t. What is it?

In my world, money’s number one job is to be in service, and our job is to work with it and help it understand how we want it to be in service with us. Instead of making an external thing in our world or something that we are nervous about or unsure how to manage, let’s understand the skills we need to learn how to manage that money. Let’s learn those skills and then attract more money to our world because when we create a safe environment for money, money attracts more money. It is the law of abundance.

Regarding your business. What’s your client avatar? What kinds of clients come to you or what are you looking for? Whom are you looking for if you need help?

Our primary clientele is small business owners who have a business set they love. They focused on all the other departments except the accounting department, so now they are ready to take control of their money. The early 6 to 7-figure business owners who want to understand the flow of money through their business are ready to learn the language of money and learn how to use their financial statements and the financial data to make informed decisions and build a profitable business so that they can create the wealth that they want to.

Speaking of business owners, as we all know, most businesses fail in the first initial years or whatnot. What are the reasons for all of that?

There are a number of reasons that businesses fail, but among the top five are not having enough cash and not being on top of the financial flow in their business, so they are not on top of their numbers. We are all in business to make money. Yet too often, business owners, when they start out, we are worried about customer service, product development, and managing our teams and marketing.

Money Management Strategies: Among the top reasons businesses fail is not having enough cash and being on top of the financial flow in their business.

All of those things have to be put in place, but what’s the resource that makes all of that happen? As most of us have not been taught about money, we are nervous about how we put our financial statements together. There hasn’t been a lot of value in the accounting side of the equation. Business owners feel like it’s an expense line item, and instead, I see it as a profitability line item. When your books are managed very well, you are on top of your receivables, payables, and profitability, and you can understand where you have got money leaks quickly.

The way that we work with our clients, the primary department for the last few years has been we are the accounting department for our clients. Those early 6 or 7-figure business owners we come in, we put the systems in place and we work very closely with our business owners with an educational approach on everything we do.

We set up a very structured and standard accounting department, and then monthly, we manage the information and work with our business owners to know how to make those decisions. Part of our work includes this understanding of the emotional relationship with money. Sometimes I will talk to my owners and when we are sitting down to have a conversation, I call it the open bathrobe conversation. The conversation of money is so intimate and challenging for everyone, but we create that safe space where people can share with us some of the shame, challenges, and hurdles they have had. We have seen it all, so we make no judgments.

It’s about being curious and finding that starting spot. Where are we starting? Where do you want to get to? What are your goals? What are the decisions we need to make from there? Before COVID hit, I created these workshops to engage business owners in this conversation of money from an emotional standpoint and combine the emotional conversation with understanding the practical data. We are getting ready to launch those online and I’m super excited about it because I love these conversations about money.

Regarding your clientele, do you work virtually with people or are you mainly working with folks around Northern California?

We were ahead of the curve before the remote, and I have an IT background that started long ago. When I launched this business, I launched it to be 100% remote. We have clients on the East Coast and South. We have clients in the Pacific Northwest. We have done it. We set up all of the document management. Everything is in the cloud, so we all have access to it, and as the software has evolved over the years, we don’t need to be on-site with the client. It’s nice to meet you in person. Nothing changes that personal relationship, but I have clients I have never met in person and we have been together for 5 or 6 years.

With your clients, how are you measuring progress? How do you measure client success or any success stories that you could even pinpoint to the work that you have done with them?

There are so many ways. I love small business, so I love watching my clients succeed and being a part of that. You and I both know that the longer we are in business, the more we are going to see the ebbs and flows both in things that we can control and the things we can’t control, like the economy, the weather, and COVID. All of those things.

It’s twofold in watching our clients’ progress. First, it’s always in watching the numbers. Are we helping them grow profit in their business, and then how are they using that profit? Are we helping them increase the cash they can hold onto? Are they increasing their staff size? Are they achieving the business goals they have set by using the numbers to monitor that?

Secondly, we listen to our client’s conversations, the questions they are asking us, and their decisions. The more confident they are in the conversation around money, the more questions that they ask us, we have come to this point in our business, what do we do next? We have seen clients through all kinds of changes. We had clients that went through a partnership breakup, and that’s a big deal for a small business.

We were able to step in and help them go through that and to watch the business owners grow, both in their education and from a legal standpoint, in how to communicate with their teams as this business was going through the transition. It was incredible and they have come out much stronger. It’s both watching the business grow both in numbers and size, but also watching.

When you can see a business owner get and understand the finances and be confident about it, their whole posture changes. The way that they step into their leadership changes. It’s a delight to watch our clients grow. We had a client to whom we transitioned. They had phenomenal growth. In 2020, they are a nonprofit organization, and in 2020, the floodgates opened for them and they transitioned. As our clients grow, one of the measures of our success do they outgrow us. Do they need to bring the accounting services in-house and we can help them transition? For us, it’s a delight to watch a business grow and sustain that level of growth and be able to bring that accounting service in-house.

I wanted to backtrack a little bit. A lot of the stuff that you are teaching, it’s even more impactful because you pulled yourself out of financial hardship in bankruptcy. Your bias says that you are able to pay off all your debt and buy a house within seven years. I’m now curious about what kinds of strategies did you even put into place to make all of that happen as you were learning from other people like wealthy people and what they do with money. What kinds of things were you doing to make all of this happen and turn your life around? I’m sure that was hard emotionally too.

I did it as a single mom.

On top of all of that. How many kids did you have?

I have one and my son is biracial, and back then, that was also a challenge. That’s why I’m super passionate about making things very accessible and equal. I did when I talked to my bankruptcy attorney and he gave me that advice, I take it for granted, but it seems like gold when I talk to my clients and other people about it. It’s going back to that starting spot.

I negotiated with my son. He was very little at the time. We set up Saturday morning as my money dating time. I knew how to do accounting. I was already doing it. I had the software to do it, but I also knew from the very basic skills I had gotten from my parents how to reconcile your checkbook. Knowing what have you sent out that hasn’t hit the bank yet, and knowing what your cash flow is going to be.

I negotiated with my son a time when I could sit down and create that relationship with my money. This is a time when I paid the bills, I made the plans. As I told you, I was working in IT, so the money was coming in. I was on commission and it was coming in well. I used that time every week to sit down and have that relationship with my money and understand how much was coming in and how much did we need.

There’s always a surprise. We always have surprises, and especially with kids, there’s a seasonal flow of money depending on where you are in your life. I can relate it to families with kids. In the late summer and early fall, there’s back to school expenses. In the fall and going towards the holidays, there are holiday expenses and additional things that you need for the winter.

We come around the beginning of the year when there are New Year’s plans, but there’s also prepping. We all have to pay taxes in April. There are vacations and kids growing up and going to college. Parents are aging and need to help them, and then we all need to save for retirement, our futures, and what we want to do.

The thing that I learned the most about what wealthy people do is twofold. They are always on top of their numbers. Whether they are doing it themselves or they have got somebody doing it, they are always working with someone to understand consistently. What do the numbers look like? How much is coming in and going out? Are we spending less than we are making? Are we keeping that positive cashflow?

The second thing that they have is what we talked about. It’s that positive attitude about money. They see money as a resource and a helpful tool rather than money where sometimes, in my past, the conversation has been, “They have a lot of money and so they have done bad things,” or money makes people do bad things and be greedy.

Money doesn’t do anything. It’s people in their decisions that do it. We want to change that relationship with money where it’s a friend. Money is there to help us and support us, and it’s up to us to tell it. How do we need its help and how do we want to use it? Have a plan and follow that plan so that we can get where we want to go and create the wealth we want to have.

One of the things I saw on your website was the money story. What is a money story?

A money story is your beliefs about money. What did you learn? We talked about this. Most of what we learned. We have learned up to the age of five. What were the things that you were told, taught, or believed about money? It comes from watching whatever family we had, whomever those adults, guardians, or people who managed the flow of money in the house.

What did we learn from our parents and our guardians? Did we learn things that I learned? Money doesn’t grow on trees. You have to work hard for the money. I have been a workaholic for much of my life. I’m a recovering workaholic. Sometimes, it was like, “Women, you needed a man to take care of you financially,” and so a lot of women have not been taught about money.

My mom was always like, “If see a penny, pick it up. All day you will have good luck.” Those kinds of things. In every culture for all of us, you’d be surprised how similar the message is for so many people, which is why I love to have very diverse conversations. You will find that some of us had parents or guardians who taught us how to be savers and how to protect our money.

Some of us will take that to an extreme where we are now hoarding our money. Instead of investing in ourselves or allowing ourselves to enjoy life, we don’t do things because we think we don’t have enough when, in fact, we may have enough money in the bank to do lots of things, but we are holding ourselves back. Others of us felt so restricted by money that we might go out and spend it to feel better and then come home and wonder why we don’t have enough to pay the bills or do the other things that we need.

Your money story is what are those beliefs that are driving those decisions? Once we speak about them and we bring them into the light, light bulbs go on. Now we understand that if I’m feeling bad and want to go out or get online and click on Amazon or wherever else we shop. If I’m feeling bad and I’m going to buy that thing and it’s going to make me feel better.

Once I understand my relationship with money, I can take a deep breath. “Do I need that thing? Let me sit on it overnight and see how I feel about it tomorrow.” Instead, maybe I need to call somebody and say, “I’m feeling lonely.” Maybe I need to go out, take a walk, and shift my energy because I have had a bad day. It’s being able to catch ourselves in that emotional moment from making a bad decision that’s going to sabotage our plan.

How often should business owners then be looking at their numbers? Is this a daily, monthly, or weekly thing? I feel like what I’m getting from you is like once you start measuring something. For example, when somebody’s losing weight. Once you start measuring things on a regular occurrence, like it’s daily, especially if you are trying to lose 10 or 15 pounds, it’s like what you measure, you become more aware of.

I’m thinking it’s a similar thing out of it here. Once you are aware and you are measuring the input and output of money and whatnot, you are more aware of these things, so you have more control and you are less in fear. I’m wondering for your business owners, what advice do you give them on how often they should look at their money and measure the input and output?

You are so spot on. That adage. You can’t manage what you are not measuring. Whether it’s a diet or anything else. Money is the same thing and we all want to manage it because the better we manage it and the more cash that we can accumulate or have, we start to feel more confident about life. We start to relax.

Money Management Strategies: You can’t manage what you are not measuring, whether it’s a diet or anything else. Money is the same thing.

It’s because you have control now. How often are you recommending your business owners and clients look at this? Is this something they look at on a daily basis? What makes me think about it because I lost my last 15 pounds. I have been stepping on the scale every day. I’m just equating it to that.

Congratulations and you look great. I’m curious to know how you did it. For business owners, at least once a week and at a minimum once a month. If you don’t know how to put the numbers together, there are lots of people out there that can help you. There are bookkeepers, and you have to be careful at the bookkeeper level because good financial statements go beyond bookkeeping and data entry.

It’s understanding the language of the profit and loss statement, the balance sheet, and how all of that information impacts the decisions you make in your business. I would encourage business owners at a minimum once a month. We require our business owners to meet with us monthly, but you want to be doing the books, especially if you are sending out invoices and trying to collect from clients, or you have expenses walking in the door. You have payroll and all kinds of things, but you want somebody on top of the books daily and at a minimum weekly.

That is very helpful. As we come to wrap up, I do have some final questions for you. The first one is about your business. What are you excited about in your business right now?

I’m excited about launching the workshop the Amani Money Method. It’s a three-pronged approach that we have developed, which is to know your numbers and understand the practical side of money, which we have talked about. Know your story which is your emotional relationship with money, and then work on your plan.

Your plan can be what’s your plan in short term? What’s your plan now? What’s your plan long-term? It can be a combination of those. Once you are dealing with all those three things and conscious of the decisions I’m making based on the flow of cash and the goals that I have, now we can make informed decisions and things pop up. Surprises pop up.

We have this plan and somewhere along the way, a mistake or decision is made that doesn’t help us, or we have an unexpected event. As long as we are managing our numbers, we are in a relationship with money in a very positive way. Everything can be changed. We can move the numbers around. We can extend or shorten the plan. We can increase sales and decrease expenses. Once we have this information in front of us, we are empowered to make decisions rather than trying to make them based on what I call hope and a prayer of financial management.

Money Management Strategies: Once we have proper information in front of us, we’re empowered to make informed decisions rather than trying to make decisions based on “hope and prayer of financial management.”

This is a trivia thing for me. I wanted to ask you about Amani Financial. How did you come up with a name? Does it mean anything special to you?

It does. When I went to incorporate, I made the rookie mistake and picked a name already out there. I got some folks to help me do some naming and this one popped out of the sky. It’s a word that means peace. Peaceful financial spoke to me, and then I had a friend who speaks Farsi translate it for me in her culture and understanding. She said that what it represents to her is a safe place or person to whom you entrust the care of your valuables. Peaceful and trusted care of your valuables, Amani Financial. Someone punctuated that we’d choose the name when I was asking friends what they thought, and he said, “It sounds like Armani. Go ahead.” For me, it means peaceful financial. That’s what I want to bring to all of our clients to help people sleep better and have peace of mind.

Another question. What does success mean to you? For everybody, it’s different. What does it mean to you?

I think that it means beyond having the freedom of choice, which is what wealth is. It’s purchasing power. Beyond the financial freedom of having choice and that thing, it’s knowing that every day I have been true to myself and what I have done has been in service and support of somebody else. If I have known I have made a difference in somebody else’s life, I feel successful on that day and in that space and time. Success is about having been able to stand in my purpose and be of service to someone else.

I wanted to ask you, is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t ask yet? Final words for my audience.

This has been such a fun interview because you have hit on all the key points that are important in this conversation about money. I want to say thank you for the work that you are doing because the conversations you have are so powerful. I want to encourage all of us to continue to have these conversations around money because it will help not only those of us and our friends and our families, but it’s going to help future generations.

You do a good job at making the topic of money less taboo and you make it a free open space for people to feel comfortable talking about it. You do a very good job at that. I could tell. Last question. How can somebody get ahold of you?

They can go to the website. It is www.Amani-Financial.com. There are a couple of places out there where if you are interested in finding out more about our accounting services, you can schedule a 30-minute interview and we will learn more about each other. There’s also a way to get our free fourteen-day money affirmation guide, which will help open up that positive communication and thought process about money.

Thank you very much for all of that. Everybody, that’s all the time we have for now. Thank you, Sara, for joining me on this episode. You are a wealth of information regarding financial literacy. I love that you live what you teach. I love how you built yourself up from your past financial struggles and figured out how to have a healthier relationship with money.

I wish they would teach more about this stuff in schools. It’s one of those things I know that I’m going to be taking responsibility for my kids to have that healthy relationship with money. I appreciate all the value from this conversation, and I know my audience will. To my readers, feel free to reach out to Sara directly if you have any more questions for her. Thank you for checking out this episode. Remember to leave me a review on iTunes as it helps me attract even more great guests like Sara. Until next time. Live life abundantly. Thanks again.

Important Links

• Amani Financial LLC
• iTunes – The School of Cash Flow

About Sara Bronson

For over 25 years Sara Bronson has been bringing calm to the chaos entrepreneurs face around money and financial management. I understand money conversations are vulnerable. That’s why Entrepreneurs need someone that understands both the practical aspects of money management, and the money-related emotional challenges they face being in business for themselves. They need someone they can trust to implement systems that really work, and help them understand how to use financial reports and tools to manage their business with confidence. I take the guess work out of numbers giving you peace of mind and confidence in growing your business.