I talk a lot here about how generally terrible I was with money, and this was very much true — I’m not saying any of it for effect. In addition to the bad credit/no savings/job-losing elements, I also just had a mentality about money in general that was really unhealthy and unsustainable. Money, to me, was a monolithic thing that one was either “good” or “bad” at, and one either had a whole lot of money, or none at all. I thought in extremes, because money seemed to be an extreme thing, and all of the money “education” I found (books, TV shows, web sites that yelled at me for being an irresponsible idiot) only reinforced this. I shut myself out from the world of getting “better with money” in any kind of incremental or sustainable way, because talking about money made me itch, and attempting to learn about it broke me out in hives.
People talked about things like retirement, 10-year goals, home ownership, investments, and other things that felt deeply scary, and I shut down. I couldn’t manage thinking about those things given how bad a place I was in, so I chose to not think about it at all. Hence, when I was finally truly sick of myself, I started TFD, so I could think about it differently.
But the things that have really helped me transform myself have always been extremely small changes, ones I could literally make over the course of the day and therefore not let fall to the side, or overwhelm me. There are things that I’ve done that took a matter of minutes or hours, and have led to huge life changes over time. But the key was being able to break them down into manageable pieces, so that I knew I couldn’t procrastinate my way out of it.
And in this week’s video, I shared what the biggest mini-changes were to me, and we shared the advice of different money experts we spoke to, about what they’d do in a day’s time to change their money lives for the better. Maybe these little boosts will help you as much as they’ve helped me.
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