Have you ever thought about whether you have Enough?
Do you know what Enough is for you?
Do you know what you’d do once you reach Enough?
I recently spoke at a professional conference (XYPNLive), down in San Diego. (My tender PNW soul quailed: The sun! It burns!)
I spoke alongside two friends and colleagues, fellow financial-planning business owners, about the concept of “Enough” in our businesses. We had each reached a stage in our business where we consciously chose to not take on more clients, not grow our revenue, not spend more time working.
The audience of our talk was fellow financial-planning business owners, but the concept of “Enough” is universal; and it’s important enough (essential, really) that I would love you to take a step back from the hurly burly of life—career, family, hobbies, etc.—and contemplate Enough for yourself.
Why we need to talk about Enough. And talk again.
Because we already talk way too much about More and Growth.
To an extent, that’s necessary. We need a certain baseline of money to just make a go of it in life. But once we reach that baseline, pursuing More and Growth is ideally something we’re making thoughtful choices about.
From a cynical but I think realistic perspective: Many people and businesses have a strong financial incentive to create and disseminate messages about More and Growth. That’s how they sell their goods and services!
By contrast, people and businesses who have embraced Enough are kinda just out there doing their thing. They don’t have much incentive to shout “Look at me! I have Enough and I’m not pursuing more!” from the rooftop. They already have what they need. Why would they go to the effort of broadcasting their voices?
Reaching and embracing Enough is a profoundly personal pursuit. It is a pursuit that, in my experience, can provide a deep sense of contentment and healthy perspective.
My Own Journey to Enough
As was the case with both of my co-presenters, my life more or less told me that I was gonna have to reevaluate how I was operating.
Back in August 2023, I was diagnosed with breast cancer Stage 0 (where are all my Stage 0, aka Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS), aka formerly-known-as-“pre-cancer” ladeez at…I’ve already met so many of you!). All the doctors reassured me that it was not invasive and not life threatening, so I never did have the spectre of death haunting me. While that helped, it didn’t particularly save me from much invasive treatment. I had one non-cancer surgery, two lumpectomies, a biopsy, an MRI-guided biopsy (holy crap, my least favorite), radiation, and ultimately a single mastectomy.
In January 2025, after everything but my mastectomy, I was told that the cancer had returned, so I needed to get a mastectomy. It was scheduled for early March 2025. I would be OOO for a full month, recovering. I set about creating a plan to ensure that my clients would still be taken care of during my absence. I had a Client Services Associate and an Associate Planner on my team, and they were both integral to the plan.
In mid-January, six weeks before my mastectomy, my Associate Planner quit. I was already Not Doing Great mentally, and this threw me for a bit of a loop.
I had to quickly adjust my OOO plan. Thankfully (and I mean that deeply), my friend and colleague Jane Yoo, who works with clients like mine, offered, unbidden, to be on full-time standby for my clients if they needed financial guidance during that time. Between her and Janice, our proactive processes, and our investment backoffice, I once again felt as if I had proper support for my clients.
Having sufficiently prepared for my OOO, I couldn’t deal with Anything More. I decided to simply not think about the issue of no longer having an Associate Planner until after my surgery, recovery, return to the office, and getting through the work backlog. I just put on my mental blinders and pushed on.
The big question I was delaying answering was: Do I hire a replacement Associate Planner, or…not?
How I Calculated My Enough
Come June, I had recovered sufficiently from my OOO to start observing the world around me again. I allowed myself to think seriously about that big question.
I looked at the state of the business as it now was:
- Just me and Janice, Client Services Associate
- Number of clients
- Revenue
- My profit from the business (which, without all the costs associated with the departed employee, was now way higher)
All those numbers intuitively looked pretty good but I needed to validate that intuition against my actual needs and wants. Which is to say, I needed to create my own financial plan: what do I want out of life, and how much money and time do I need to accomplish it?
How much Time is Enough?
I started by looking at the time I wanted out of the business.
I looked out over a year and literally counted the number of days I wanted off for vacations, visiting family, my kids’ events, and other personal time (especially those amazing four-day solo weekends in the foothills of Mt. Baker). I could then tell how many days I had available to work in the business.
I knew how many hours I need each year (on average, and with plenty of room for error) to serve a client, so I divided one by the other and out popped the number of clients I can serve (and serve well) during the time I want to give to the business.
How much Money is Enough?
I then looked at how much money I wanted out of the business. My husband and I work with a financial planner and I had some input from that work. I also (naturally) ran my own projections in my financial planning software to figure out how much money I needed to pay for all my wants and needs this year and also how much money I needed to save for future wants and needs.
Because I’m a good little business owner and track my financials closely, I knew how much money it takes to run my business outside of me. I added my income needs to those expenses, and voila, I arrived at the gross revenue my business needs.
What I quickly realized was: I had fewer clients than the max I could serve (so I had enough time), and my revenue was higher than it needed to be (so I had enough money).
In other words, I had Enough. I was done.
(Which easily answered my original daunting question: Nope, I didn’t need to hire a new Associate Planner. I was good.)
I chose Time and Money as my measures of Enough. These are the two most obvious measures, but they’re not the only ones. You might measure your Enough in terms of impact, for example.
Reaching Enough Isn’t the End. You Gotta Practice Enough.
Reaching Enough isn’t a one-and-done.
For me, at least, it has required persistent attention, reminding myself that I’m measuring myself against my own plan, not against outside metrics or goals. There is unrelenting pressure to seek More More More.
Go ahead and guess the ratio, in my professional world, between conference sessions about “here’s how to grow your business and attract more clients and hire more people” and sessions about “hey, uh, so you could just…not.” And that’s just a microcosm of the culture we all live in. So I feel strongly that we have to counter those messages with a pretty unrelenting focus on What Is My Enough and Why.
Whenever I’m feeling some sort of way when confronted with someone else’s metrics, it is very helpful for me to come back to the specifics of my own plan. My plan is founded on my values, my goals, my relationships, my why. Sure, my finances might not be Enough for someone else’s life. Just as your finances might not either.
But then again…who cares? It’s like pointing out that you’re not doing the same exercises as the woman in the gym next to you. And your point is…? I feel really good when I look at what I have, look at what I’m doing, compare it to my plan, and see that Yep, that fits.
This work only makes sense if you are tethering yourself to the metrics that have real meaning for you and your life.
That said, it’s hard to stick with Enough if you’re surrounded by people who have More and always want More. This is genuinely one of the better things that came out of my husband and me leaving San Francisco, gosh, almost 20 years ago, and ending up in Bellingham, WA. There is just not a lot of conspicuous consumption around here. (On the flip side, I struggle with never feeling “Enough” in Bellingham when it comes to outdoor activity and sports.)
I think “Enough” is a worthwhile concept to think about at any point in life. It just might be a bit harder to really embrace when you’re younger and you don’t have much yet. I think that as we get older and wealthier, it becomes not only more feasible to declare “Enough!” but also more important to stop squandering our time and emotions on things that simply aren’t part of our rich lives.
My parting advice:
- Pay attention to the people and messages you surround yourself with.
- In order to get to Enough, first do your own financial life planning.
- Once you achieve Enough, continue to practice it. Forever, I imagine.
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