MoneyWiseWomen

Financial Literacy and Stress Awareness Month

I think it is wonderful that Financial Literacy Awareness Month and Stress Awareness Month are both in the month of April. I think it makes perfect sense because money is the number one source of stress in people today according to the APA’s Stress in America report. 

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/index.aspx 

Money came in ahead of relationships, family, health, and job stability. In a recent poll on Stress 7 out of 10 people said they were “very stressed” about money. 

So how does the financial stress we are feeling affect our health? Stress can lead to health problems. It can affect your cellular level and if stress is long term it can lead to many illnesses.  Extreme stress or stress over long periods of time (called chronic stress) can damage your emotional and physical health. When was the last time you had trouble sleeping, struggled with tiredness, headaches, backaches, upset stomach or irritability? Did you know that these are all symptoms of chronic stress?  

Happy National Walking Day! Walk and Reduce Financial Stress

For years I have enjoyed daily walks for my health.  But not only do I walk for my health I love to walk because it is a time that I get to be by myself, which is something I relish as a mom of four and step mother to two. The other thing I love about walking is that it helps reduce any stress I might be feeling. When my walk ends I feel stronger physically and emotionally.

When Prevention Magazine posed the question “What Makes You Want to Walk?” to a number of walkers a few years back, they expected to get answers like "to lose weight" and "to get in shape." But they were delighted by the number of people who commented on walking's emotional benefits; in particular, its ability to relieve stress.

Achieving Your Goals Don't Always Happen Overnight

What do I have in Common with Human Nature, a group of performers have in common?

• We both performed in Las Vegas on the same day;
• We both have long term goals that we’ve achieved;
• And,I know it’s a STRETCH but we both have ties to Australia – they are from Australia and I have a Minature Australian Shepherd (Izzy).

On Saturday, June 2nd I was the opening keynote speaker at the Nevada Women’s Money Conference hosted by the Nevada State Treasurer Kate Marshall. Being a keynote speaker achieved a goal I set 13 years ago when I attended the Smart Women Smart Money Conference hosted by Idaho State Treasurer Ron Crane. I was working as a PR specialist at Social Security. Attending the Smart Women Smart Money conference ignited a passion that changed my life. I realized I wanted to educate and empower women to live financially healthy. It took three years to summon the courage to step outside my comfort zone. In August 2002 I took early retirement and founded Money Wise Women Educational Services, a non-profit organized. One of the goals I set for myself was to be a keynote speaker at a state treasurer’s women and money conference. Over the next 10 years I made contact with several state treasurer’s offices. A few months ago while surfing the net I discovered the Nevada Women’s Money Conference created by Gina Robison Billups, CEO of the International Association of Working Mothers. Gina interviewed me a few years ago on her radio show. I reached out to her and was thrilled when I received the invitation to be the opening keynote speaker at the Las Vegas and Reno conferences.

How Committed Are You To Getting The Results You Seek?

Many people start off the New Year with good intentions for fulfilling resolutions, but their interest and enthusiasm often wanes away by the end of February. This year, make a difference in your life. Review your habits and past behaviors that have previously not produced the results you desire. Be honest with yourself. Examine your circumstances carefully to determine what part you have played in the outcomes you have experienced. Don’t rely on your employer, market conditions, or your family obligations to dictate what happens to you (or doesn’t) this year. Make a commitment to reach your goals by outlining specific actions to accomplish them.

It seems the elements I observe that contribute more frequently than not to a stalled job search or poor results are associated with three elements: lack of commitment, failure to plan and unwillingness to change.  The following questions might help you to determine if you are setting yourself up for success, or more of the same this year.

Applying Spousonomics To Money Problems

Always telling the truth about money is something to aspire to, but it may be unrealistic marriage advice. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in a blog post that it is absolutely essential that couples are 100% transparent about their money, or else the relationship probably won’t survive. How silly I am.

Spousonomics shows that this just isn’t true! The book, by Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson, offers a hilarious and valid twist to standard marriage advice by showing how economics—yes, economics—is the key to a happy marriage. What it also showed me is that married people aren’t 100% honest with each other, especially not about money.

In what the call their Exhaustive, Groundbreaking and Very Expensive Marriage Survey, Szuchman and Anderson discovered that based on economics, there are actually incentives for spouses to lie to one other. One such principle is Asymmetrical Information. This means that if you’re totally honest about a topic you might be penalized, so consequently, you withhold information when communicating. For example, you might fudge on the amount of time it takes you to complete a task you were asked to perform by your spouse because you want to build in enough time to goof off before you actually do it. So you lie about it instead of being nagged by your spouse or assigned additional tasks. By withholding information, you get what you want from the spousal transaction.

Is Occupy Wall Street The Answer To Your Money Problems?

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a resistance movement of people who want Wall Street, the government and corporations to realize that individuals have the power to create change from the bottom-up. Yet the language of OWS concerns me, because it’s the language of war, instead of the language of collaboration and integration.

OWS doesn’t have an official website, just an unofficial de facto online resource (as it calls itself). It describes itself as leaderless resistance movement. Occupy Wall Street states it is composed of the We Are The 99%, and that they will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. On its website, it states they are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactics and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants (Hmmm . . . ).

It’s exciting to see Occupy Wall Street all over the country deliver a message that transcends government and party politics. I am interested to see how OWS takes part in the conversation of change. Yet I can’t help but wonder if the language that is being used in OWS isn’t what got us into this mess in the first place.

There is no place to go and see the accomplishments of OWS to date, which makes it similar to our experience with war in Iraq; is anything really getting done, or are we being swept away by propaganda? There is a lot of talk, but what kind of results or payoff can we identify? Is our most effective target for occupation really Wall Street, or is something else?

Shame and Money Secrets

Money secrets are some of the most shame-filled secrets we keep. We’ve all heard that “the truth will set you free,” however, I believe that there are two kinds of money secrets we keep: the ones we keep because it’s inconvenient to tell the truth and the ones we keep because we don’t want to hurt ourselves.

Sometimes we keep a money secret because we don’t want to deal with the questions and issues that will be raised if we reveal our secret. Or we think it’s none of their business what goes on in our personal financial situation. I happen to think it’s completely okay to keep quiet about some things. For example, my parents know quite a bit about my financial situation, but they don’t know everything. I imagine they think they know more than they actually do, and I am okay with that. They know that some times have been rough, but maybe not how rough . . . and they know when times have been good, but maybe not every single stupid money decision I have ever made.

Notice too I am making a distinction between active lying andnon-disclosure; I don’t believe I actively lie about anything, but I certainly don’t feel like everyone needs the complete “E True Hollywood Story” train wreck version whenever something difficult occurs.

With your loved ones and life partners: I think you need to be absolutely transparent with your money. People think that money is the #1 reason why marriages break up, but I think that statistic is sort of like saying that the reason a marriage broke up was because of cheating: cheating may have caused the final break, but there were a million missed intimacies, communications and decisions made that led up to the cheating. Same for money; money in and of itself is never the reason a marriage ends, it’s everything around it. Money is a symptom. Transparency ensures that at least communication about money will not be the marriage’s downfall.

Failure is Just The Beginning

Many people thinking of failure as the undesirable end of something they attempted, when really it is just the beginning.

People are scared right now because it seems like our economy is never going to fully recover from the 2008 mortgage fiasco.  They worry about losing their home, their job, or being a bag lady in retirement; small business owners wonder how they are going to cover overhead, let alone thrive. The one (small) consolation we have is that everyone is "failing" as part of a global economy, versus just one individual experiencing it alone.

Energetic Organization for Piles of Money

You might think it's not worth trying to manage your money if you only have small amounts, but in reality,  you can’t manage large piles of money until you are able to manage SMALL piles of money.  I know some people might think this is self-evident, but this statement reminded me of how getting serious about money management helped me several years ago.

I can remember a time starting out when I wasn’t making very much money, so I just let it all hang out in my checking account.  I thought to myself, “There’s nothing here to manage, so why bother?  When I start making really good money, THEN I’ll get more organized; I’ll start saving for retirement, setting aside money for an estimated tax fund, have money go regularly to my cash reserve . . . but I don’t need to get serious about money management until I have more money to manage.”

So I didn’t get organized and nothing horrible happened; as my business took off I started making more money.  And you know what?  I stayed exactly as unorganized with the money as I had always been.  Eventually, as I learned more and more as a planner and self-employed business owner; I started to sort out, organize and clarify my own finances, but it took years and many experiences to straighten me out (luckily, most people don’t need to be knocked over the head the way I needed to be).

As a side note, it’s a fallacy to think that because financial advisors deal with people’s finances day in and day out that their OWN financial life is in order.  A lot of them have the same attitude I did; they didn’t need to focus on their own finances until they made more money.  And the fact that their job is all about money tends to attract people with their own money hang-ups.

My income dipped again when I sold my traditional planning practice.  This time, however, I had been properly assimilated into organization and I couldn’t go back.  So I still had my tax fund, my cash reserve fund, my retirement savings and small bits of money regularly going into all three.  When I finally started to make more money, I still had the practical systems to accommodate it.

The connection I made when I heard the “piles of money” axiom recently was realizing that organizing yourself to manage small piles of money is actually energetically and emotionally preparing you for the larger piles of money.  Years ago, I would have taken the statement at face value and understood intellectually, that it was a good idea to be organized.  I would have missed the implication that aligns with manifestation principles: that you have to be an energetic match to whatever it is you want to create.

Think about having a baby:  you run around for nine months getting every detail PERFECT to receive this little bundle of joy because you know your life will be different and much busier after s/he arrives.  You never doubt that s/he is coming and you plan accordingly.  You wouldn’t wait until the baby is born and then say, “Wow, I guess I better get the baby stuff organized.”  You would never defend your lack of organization by saying, “Hey, it wasn’t here yet so there was no reason to do anything yet.”

Another analogy might be hosting a party . . . you don’t wait for the guest to show up to plan the menu, go shopping and cook the food.  You’re supposed to be ready for them when they show up.

The point is, you should look at your financial life with no less anticipation than you would the arrival of something very precious or exciting.  Your money should receive a proper welcome, and have a place to live, where it can get settled and make itself comfortable.

If you’re unhappy with the amount of money you’re making, or you think you don’t make enough to “manage” it, get yourself organized.   Set up the systems to manage your money NOW, so that you can accommodate a large influx when it happens—and maybe BECAUSE you are ready, it will happen that much sooner.

Mindy Crary (MBA, CFP® practitioner and financial coach at Creative Money) helps you become a lot more educated (never inundated) about not just your money — but the whackjob behind it.

Reality, Get a Dose: Step 2

In the first of this series on financial well being and health, Just Do It, we walked through the steps of a Fully Fit Plan. I encourage people to take a look at where they want to be before they look at where they are.

It’s the same philosophy as Jim Rohn’s excellent quote “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” If you’re hanging out only with your current spending plan, only looking at your current reality, energetically you’re creating the same plan for yourself, repeatedly.

If every month you first look at your Fully Fit Plan, it will remind you where you’re headed, where your intentions and dreams are. Simply writing the Plan out declares to the universe, and to your subconscious, that you are on a path.

It also prepares you for a dose of reality: your current spending plan. Now it's time to look, see and tell the truth.

It’s true that not everyone reading this sees their current spending plan as dismal, tight, something to move beyond. But I’m thinking many of you do. If you’re current spending plan had an extra $1,000 a month in it, you probably wouldn’t be reading my blog, you’d be at Intelligent Investing reading Chris Barth.

In my last blog, 3 Money Steps Toward Joy This Holiday Season, I wrote about putting together a mini-spending plan for Holiday Spending. If you’ve never done a spending plan before, it’s a great way to start by just focusing on one month. It’s less overwhelming. If you’d like guidance on walking through it, you can join me on a free training: Empower Your Holidays.