- As we continue our Awesome Finances Challenge, we’ll continue our daily sessions … and if you haven’t been doing them, let go of guilt and start now!
So our focus is to continue tackling the messes, and work on getting things in awesome order.
Make a list of the things you’d like to tackle this week, one small step at a time. The list might look something like this:
- Sort through bills and make a list of them and a plan to pay them.
- Update my financial tracking system with new transactions.
- Update my budget (or start one).
- Make a plan to pay off my credit cards.
- Start going through my medical bills and making a plan.
- Go through emails from my tax accountant.
- Get my tax forms in order.
It doesn’t have to look anything like this – everyone’s list will look pretty different. Just make a list, and feel free to add to it as the month goes on.
Each day, tackle something on the list. It might take you all week to tackle just one thing — that’s OK! Or maybe it takes you two days per item. Don’t worry about how long it’ll take you. Just face one thing and put yourself into it during the session.
Facing the Fears
We invest a lot of emotions into financial problems and messes, because we thing that they say something about us:
- We’re bad at dealing with finances.
- We’re late with tax stuff so obviously we’re a mess.
- We procrastinate and that means we suck.
- We’re undisciplined, and can’t stick to anything.
- We spend too much on clothes, so there’s something unworthy or inadequate about us.
- We don’t have enough money to pay the bills so we’re terrible.
You can see that finances are really a gateway into all kinds of emotions, all kinds of ways we feel about ourselves.
Breathe.
They don’t say anything about you. At all. It’s just a pile of stuff to work through, just like your pile of work stuff and your pile of chores and your pile of things to sort through in the garage or shed. Yes, I know that most of us use all of those kinds of piles as ways to judge ourselves as well. But the piles say nothing about us. They’re just piles, and we just need to pick the first thing off the pile and focus on figuring it out.
One thing at a time, just breathe and deal with it. You can do this.
Remove the emotional judgment from the finances, and just see them as an opportunity to get things in order, to move towards the financial life that you want.
You got this