How do you feel about money?
Over the past year and a half I have developed a completely different relationship with my money. It actually started to shift in the fall of 2020 likely because of a course I was taking around boundaries. However there was much more going on than that. A video on YouTube caught my eye and my interest. It spoke of money being energy. If you tossed a pile of money on the ground all it would do is sit there. You could burn it to keep warm but it really had no ability to be dynamic like, uhm... say another person could be. From that I began to develop this feeling around money that it held less importance in my life than it had in the past.
Have money thoughts taken over your life?
There is something to be said about the people you surround yourself with. More and more frequently I am choosing people who are wanting to experience positive changes. One of these people helped me realize that my husband and I were instant gratification type of people with our money.
If we had money we needed to get this or that right now before we didn't have any money to get it with. Kind of a convoluted way of thing. One of our goals in 2022 was to help pay for our daughter's wedding. In the past this would have been done on credit cards and we would still owe.
A couple of things had to shift. The biggest one was how were we going to have the money available to actually help out? In other words what could we stop doing or stop buying so that we did have the money?
Granted my husband did have a good paying job so that helped a bit. The habit was the big hurdle. We have it. Let's spend it.
You know I speak often about feelings. Part of this came down to exactly that. How did we want to feel at the end of the wedding?
At this point replace the word wedding with a word of your own... month, year, holiday, etc.
I wanted to feel like we did help pay for the wedding. I wanted to feel joy at being able to help out. I wanted to feel like having fun at the wedding rather than worrying about how much it cost and if the kids could afford it?
The next step was deciding what we could do without for a while. Another habit we created was making the decision to pay into the wedding kitty X amount of dollars every pay cheque! PERIOD!!! If more could go in then more would go in.
Choosing where and how to spend our money wisely and most effectively. MacDonald's with the kids, gas saving cards, and booking rooms months in advance. Those same rooms were sold out and a hundred dollars a night more expensive when the wedding date arrived.
Then there is another whole side of this. What childhood memories were affecting how we were looking at money? The reality of that is this was something no one discussed in my house growing up. Or if it was it was behind closed doors so the kids (my sister and I) couldn't hear. This actually created the habit for me as the adult of not talking about our money.
Are your own kids carrying on your money habits?
Do you know how to ask for help?
As I sit with my kids now, I have open conversations with them, in front of their kids about money. The truth about this is that to become comfortable to have conversations with anyone, even my own husband, I needed to be comfortable about talking about money. I am here for you if you need help… I am available.
