January 07, 2020 How do you ‘feel’ about money?!
Here’s a question I bet you’ve never asked yourself: “how does money make me feel?”
It’s a tricky one to answer, right?!
From my experience, there’s always an emotional attachment to money. No one’s ever truly rational when it comes to spending.
In fact, most of our behaviours around spending have a degree of recklessness or exuberance.
Ever bought a big-ticket item online on a Friday night after having a couple of glasses of wine, only to wake up the next day with buyer’s remorse, accompanied by some serious guilt?
We’ve all been there.
What if I told you that the way you think and feel about money dictates your relationship with money and, ultimately, whether or not you’re in the driver’s seat and using the money you do have to your advantage.
In other words, we regularly make decisions about money that not only impact our financial situation but exacerbate our feelings around money and, more worryingly, further contribute to our future behaviours and decisions around our spending.
Without wanting to sound like an armchair psychologist, if you were brought up with a healthy relationship towards money and saving, chances are, in adult life, you’ll have a healthy relationship with money.
If the opposite is true, it’s highly likely you’ll have an unhealthy relationship with money.
Either way, emotion and anxiety always play a role in our financial decisions. It just comes down to what degree, depending on your own life experience with money.
Okay, so how do we get to a point to where we’re not ruled by emotion when it comes to money and, in turn, make clear-cut decisions whilst doing our best to take the emotion of them?
Now, look, there’s no silver bullet. I’m not suggesting that. But I’ll let you in on something.
Something that will help you make some serious inroads into improving your relationship with money and minimising any emotional hang-ups you may with your finances.
Are you ready for it? One word: automation.
Is that it? I can hear you say. Bear with me and let me indulge you for a moment.
You obviously need to sit down and work out a financial game plan – or at least a budget you can stick to at a minimum – but the more you can automate your regular spending, paying bills and routinely putting savings aside, the more you take the emotion out of those decisions around money.
Consistently taking the emotion out of micro-financial decisions will, slowly but surely, help you eventually change your macro behaviour around your finances and how you feel about money.
You still with me?
Okay, cool.
Speaking from experience, automation was one of the pivotal things that helped me shift my behaviour many moons ago.
For me, over time, this behavioural change has helped me become much fearless when it comes to important financial decisions, particularly in terms of, say, investing in shares, for instance, and buying an investment property.
As always, feel free to reach out if there’s any way I can help. You can book some time in my diary below.
No Comments