Money and Fear
What are you afraid of?
- I am embarrassed
- I don’t want to think about it
- I am not good with numbers
- I never understood stocks and IRA’s
- I am afraid to look
- I don’t know how much I owe
- I was really bad with money at one point
- My credit report is in bad shape
- I had creditors coming after me once
- I messed up on my taxes once
- I racked up a ton of credit card debt in my 20’s.
- I opened up too many credit cards
- My divorce wrecked my finances
- I was unemployed for a long time
- I had some serious health issues affect my finances
- I experienced a family tragedy
- I made some mistakes
Does at least one of these sound familiar? That is because everyone has had one or more of these thoughts at some point. Everyone.
Move forward
The sooner you can understand that everyone has had these thoughts the sooner you can overcome the fear and anxiety of dealing with your money. Who wants extra stress? I don’t. Think about it. Everyone deals with money and these issues. We have a lots of fear when it comes to money. It is just fear.
No one taught us
That’s right. No one taught us about money. The reason your stress about money might be exaggerated is because you were told not to talk about money. “Don’t talk about Money, Politics, or Sex. Its not polite.” Ever hear that before? You probably never talked about money with your parent(s) or friends. Ok, maybe how to balance a check book or what type of job to get. Maybe you even spent 4 weeks in high school classroom talking about a budget. It was probably a fantasy budget where rent was $300 and groceries were $100. Ha! And you know what? Credit cards were barely around before the 90’s. Now, when you go to college, you can get three credit cards with no credit check, AND you get a free water bottle and a frisbee! Cool! In fact you cant go to a concert or rent a car unless you own a credit card.
You are not alone
So just remember that you are not alone. And in order to move ahead with your money you only need to be truthful with yourself. Now start planning and remove some stress from your life.