Lauren Freise – Be Confident and Deliberate When It comes to Planning out Your Future

Laruen Freise is a senior HR director at RBC. She is also a classic example of a Canadian woman who was confused about what to do and what not to do but still invested her efforts and got successful. She says:

“When I graduated from Queen’s University with an economics degree in the year of 2005, I was feeling quite lost. Therefore, I applied to an admired grad school and graduated from there in 2006. Later on, I saw the range of UK-based online websites for many jobseekers, thus, I made up my mind to create a consulting job in London.

            However, at that time, I was not confident and deliberate my financial plan properly. I did not make any success with my consulting job. Then I went back to Canada, which I knew would offer a better prospect for me in online job counselling. Not long after that, I found TalentEgg, which is a website that specifies in bridging the graduates and the students with numbers of Canadian employers. I made this website with the main goal of planning out the careers, along with the financial plan future of those graduates.

            In creating TalentEgg, I got to experience some interesting facts and I cannot forget how amazed I really was when I got to know them. For starting a platform, you have to make a proper financial plan which is capable of boosting your idea to practicality and I was unaware of how to create such a financial plan. When I could not develop it, I reached a conclusion that it was because of the weak foundation in finance. From the start, I was not told that knowing the basic of finance would be beneficial for me in the future. Thus, I never busied myself in understanding finance and what were its benefits. However, I got to know its importance when I had to make a financial plan for it myself. For your startup, you need to make a very strong financial plan and without it, you cannot power up your startup. In fact, there are various stages in your business when you need to invest money and I didn’t know how to do that. Although I got it in the end, I also realized the importance of knowing finance in daily life as well.

            Before I had to develop a financial plan, I used to come across different tasks related to finance but I would pass them to my colleagues or just would not pay any attention to them. I believed that finance was a complex subject and it is implemented only in its field. I really didn’t know that the advantages and potential of finance are limitless and it has applications almost in every aspect of business and life which involves numbers and budget. I talked about how a startup needs a financial plan to work but in reality, every organization requires a financial plan. In countries around the world, there are countless organizations and all of them have their own departments of finance. There are financial experts working in those departments who are making plans for the firms to continue operating in a sustainable manner. They are analyzing past figures and future data to make a proper and stable plan which can be implemented by firms. In addition to it, they are even managing the payrolls and other investments for the firms. And the majority of functions of firms are based on their financial plans.

            I think that most of the women are unable to manage their finances just because they don’t when and where to start. Actually, there is no specific time when you should start managing your budget and other expenses. For a moment, you should think that whenever there is a task that you must complete, if you don’t know when and how to start, you will never be able to begin it. If you are worried about not be able to manage your finance then you should just start managing from that moment onwards. In fact, you don’t even have to study books and articles to start. All you need is paper and a pen for starters. For a housewife, a financial plan will tell her how she needs to spend her money and whether she has spent more money this month or not. It will also tell her about her savings. You can make all these sections on the paper and use it daily to record your expenses. When you know how you can manage your finances better then you can just use an application for digitalizing your plans and storing them. This method can be utilized by both housewives and working women who face a hard time keeping track of their money.

            Once you know that you have been managing your money better for the past few months, you can start saving your money. In your financial plan, you should note all the savings that you do and at the end of the year, how much money will you save if you continue saving a specific amount each month. Some might think that it is hard but for being an entrepreneur and financially independent woman, it is one of the most important steps that you should perform. Once you have enough money that you can utilize, you can invest it and make your own platform for instance. Mobile and web-platforms have gained a lot of popularity and they offer countless opportunities to young entrepreneurs. If you have an interest in them and have an idea which you would like to pursue, you can invest your money in it.

            And now that I have come to understand the operations and functions of finance, I am able to manage my finance in a better way. I control my overall budget and I know that I am doing it better than before. I believe that every other woman has to understand finance in order to be financially independent. If you want to work and earn money then you have to make sure that you understand how to manage it.

My advice for other women is, we need to be really confident and deliberate a proper financial plan to get success in our business. Hence, if we want to achieve success in our business, then we need to make a proper financial plan. For making a proper financial plan, we ought to know the concepts and theories of finance which can be useful to us. Finance can be a boring subject and I admit it but its importance is undeniable and I didn’t realize it until I faced the situation when I had to make a financial plan for my own business. In the world where women around the world have more freedom, Canadian women also have the opportunity to be financially independent and for that, they must understand finance.