Many of us feel wobbly when it comes to money. All sorts of negative feelings from the fear of failure to not wanting to wait for wealth to grow contributes to our feeling of awkwardness towards attaining a successful financial future. These feelings hold us back. A change in the mental approach to personal finance.
Say you feel under the weather, the most sensible thing to do is to go to your local doctor or nurse to have your temperature and blood pressure, for example, to see where your health is compared to a healthy person. Budgets work similarly, albeit for money.
But before you go on creating budgets out of the blue, focus first on changing your mentality about money. You can start with these steps:
1. Awareness
You can begin by asking yourself, “What are my money challenges?” Include all the nasty sounding ones as most money issues are not truly pretty. This way you feel the urge to eliminate them and start making changes.
A prime example of a challenge is the filing of personal taxes. Many prolong the discomfort because they do not know the requirements and therefore resist to care – not realising the problems later can get even more stressful (think penalties). Recurring money matters like this need to be addressed on a timely basis and you would realise it is not as bad as you thought.
2. Acceptance
You also need to find it within yourself to accept and feel pain, so you can open the door to acceptance. This means you will feel uncomfortable. Feelings of guilt, shame, greed or frustration are what most of us generally avoid feeling. This resistance must be understood because doing so will force you look at them more objectively. This will lead to you realising that the more we resist the longer they will stay.
3. Allow Change
Following introspection is the understanding of the cause of your feelings. Is it the way you spend money? Avoiding planning around money feeds into your fear of not having enough money. This does not have to be your reality. This needs to change, and you must allow it. This will lead you to your financial happiness.
4. Take Action
At this point, you must be feeling comfortable at the idea of budgeting. You might even feel excited because this way you are leaving your past behind to begin journeying on your path to financial success. The budget is your diagnostic tool to guide you in your pursuit of greater control over money.
First, you need to know where you at with your money. This will set you to be proactive (as opposed to being reactive). When you have too little, take this as an opportunity to cut back on expenses or earn more money. If you have a hobby that you can earn money from, use that to hobby to increase your cash inflow.
Doing up a budget presents you a picture of where you are at with your money, and helps you point out which areas you need to work on (most people would find unnecessary credit card debts and impulse spending). With a budget, you can see opportunities to earn more money. At the same time, you open opportunity to identify expenses that you can live without and free up money tied to them.
You will find at this point that you are now in control of your money – rather than money being in control of you. This should help you achieve peace of mind and rid yourself of financial worries you so avoid for a long time.
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