Money Basics
Apr 21, 2020
Today let’s talk about money basics.
Money basics include:
- Saving for the future
- Tracking expenses
- Knowing the difference between saving money by purchasing today and impulse buying
- “Seeing” income vs outflows and knowing why the money is going that direction
- Investing your money in financial vehicles that allow it to grow in value
- And breaking the mindset of “I NEED to buy this today, I’ll start saving tomorrow”
This is not a complete list of all the topics we will be covering in this blog.
These topics are the ones discussed most often and where we will start.
Today, specifically, I want to focus on mindset.
There are many of you out there that feel overwhelmed by your current financial situation. You may use buying a new blouse, a meal at a fancy restaurant, or a trip to a spa as a reward for surviving a bad week at work.
You then find that the reduction in your bank account makes paying the bills that month a bit more challenging.
So let’s start to work on better ways to reward yourself, as you are starting on your road to financial freedom.
First of all, I want you to do your best to avoid using the following words, “Try”, “But”, “Weight loss”.
Paraphrasing Yoda, “Do or do not there is no Try”. If you use the word ‘Try’ you are telling yourself that you don’t believe this will work. And most times you “try” you will be unsuccessful. So decide right now to do something different and drop the word ‘Try’.
Why am I suggesting ‘But’ is a problem? It has to do with how the word but is used. When used in a sentence ‘But’ negates what came before. This in turn makes your mind start ignoring what came before the ‘but’ even though it may have been important. ‘But’ has a negative feeling overall while a word like yet or however are more neutral words to use.
I wanted to buy the blue dress but my size was sold out.
I wanted to buy the blue dress however the store only had red in my size.
For those who feel overwhelmed by their financial situation and their physical body, then drop the term “weight loss” from your vocabulary. Every time you tell yourself or others about your weight loss, your mind hears “loss” and feels that it must find what is lost. Consider a different phrase such as weight reduction program instead.
Some of you are wondering if you stumbled on an English lecture rather than a financial blog.
The reason I am spending so much time on words and mindset is that I have discovered over the past 20 years that the words I use to describe my situation have made a significant impact on how things turned out.
For example: Once I passed 40 I found that just looking at food seemed to put 5 pounds on my body. I tried all kinds of diet and exercise programs and they would work for a while. Then I went to a seminar where the instructor told us to drop certain words from our vocabulary, in particular, ‘try’ and ‘weight loss.
When he first suggested that I thought he was crazy. Saying to myself, what difference will the words I use make?
Fast forward 3 years. I dropped 50 pounds and have kept it off for over 5 years. I followed the food plan that I had been using before the seminar. I followed the same exercise routine. The only thing that changed was the words I used to describe what I was doing.
For some of you, diet may be a negative word that you need to remove from your vocabulary. You can substitute the more neutral food plan for the word diet.
Your assignment for today is to sit quietly with a pen and paper and write down all the negative words in your life. Then come up with more neutral or positive choices to use.
For Example:
Negative Neutral/Positive
Try Do
Weight Loss Weight reduction, dropping pounds, reducing my waist line
Diet Food plan, Daily meal plan, Way of eating
Well, you get the idea. Take 10-15 minutes to do this exercise and then post the words in a prominent place. This will remind you of the words you are removing from your vocabulary to help you get to your desired goals.
I believe in you!
