Your bank account, investing strategy, and credit score aren’t the most important parts of your financial life. Your net worth or rate of return aren’t even the most pivotal. The most important part of your financial life is your mindset.
Without the right way of thinking and feeling about your financial well-being, those other metrics of success amount to nothing. A healthy mindset leads to healthy behaviors and a productive relationship with your money. Without this foundational approach to managing your financial life, all the positive planning and execution on the world won’t improve your overall life. Having the right money mindset means:
1. Developing an Abundance Mindset
Much of the world operates in a mindset of scarcity. The debt crises, global conflict, and fear-based media all operate from a scarcity mindset. They believe that opportunity is limited and that your good fortune is under threat. A mindset of abundance accepts these risks, but knows that there are more opportunities waiting if you plan and act effectively. Adopting an abundance mindset means being thankful for the good things in life and knowing there is more good waiting for those who plan and act correctly to reach their goals.
A good way to grow your abundance mindset is to challenge encroaching, negative thoughts that may arise when you are stressed by re-framing them as positive opportunities rather than threats.
2. Anticipating Your Nature
Part of a healthy financial mindset involves knowing yourself and being honest about who you are. We are all impulsive, emotional, messy human beings. Developing overly tight budgets that don’t allow for your occasional impulse can torpedo all of your efforts towards financial self-improvement. Feeling deprived can make you lash out and resent your own efforts in impulsive ways that lead to overcharges and other negative outcomes.
Know what your impulsive vices are and plan to reduce those in healthy ways while still giving yourself the occasional reward. Whether that means an impulsive purchase of an ebook on sale or treating yourself to a movie theater trip once a month, you have to allow yourself to enjoy life while working towards financial wellness.
3. Rolling with the Punches
The trajectory of success is never a straight line and neither is your financial trend line. Changing behaviors, investing, and trying to better your financial status all come with associated risks. Can you handle negative returns on higher risk investments? Can you run your finances like a business and accept that your funds will be working for you in several different places? Accepting the constant presence of change and uncertainty and remaining self-assured that your strategy WILL work for you is essential for your mindset.
Automated investment and savings strategies can help make this easier for you by keeping it out of sight and out of mind. Market downturns and hiccups happen, but the trick is trusting in your strong strategy to weather the market volatility that can harm your investments.
4. Staying Motivated
Staying the course and maintaining your focus on the positive outcomes you’re working toward is easy early on in your financial journey. Can you maintain that focus in year? Five years? Figuring out what steps you have to take to keep yourself motivated and working toward financial prosperity is key for your journey. It’s a moving target and requires radical honesty with yourself, but maintaining that motivation is essential. Some people use vision boards or other simple reminders of what they’re working towards.
Some people track behavior streaks on a calendar or in a mobile app. What works best for you won’t hold true for everyone else; you just have to figure out how to keep yourself motivated in a natural and effective way.
5. Expressing Gratitude
Being thankful for what you currently have and for the future you are building will help immensely. Too many people spend their lives pessimistic and jaded, resenting their current status without taking real action to improve their standing. It goes beyond appreciating what you have. True gratitude means celebrating others’ good fortunes and contributing to a better world through your self improvement. Your most valuable asset is you, and you should be thankful for the commitment you are making to yourself and your life as you begin this journey towards a better financial life.
Taking these steps will help put you on the right path towards cultivating a healthy financial mindset. Want to learn more about effective money management principles and see how we improve our client’s lives? Contact us to discuss how we can help you on your financial journey.
