Overcoming Financial Stress (And A Free Resource 🎉)
Financial stress is no joke, first name / friend, and we all come face-to-face with it. It’s also a taboo topic that we avoid, and whenever I bring it up, typically triggers someone. But I do it anyway because it’s an essential part of our freedom to choose how we spend our time and define success for ourselves.
When I began building my career, I experienced three back-to-back layoffs in three years. I then feared foreclosing on the home I bought in a rush as the result of getting a restraining order against my then landlord (at age 23). Feeling like working for other people wasn’t as ‘stable’ as I’d been led to believe, at 25, I started a credit card processing company with my twin brother and ran through my savings in about 6 months.
To say I was stressed would be an understatement. I was living in a cell of my own making, shutting off cable, canceling my gym membership and magazine subscriptions, saying ‘no’ to every invitation for dinner or other fun that had a cost attached to it. I felt like I couldn’t live until I ‘earned it’ and was obsessively checking my bank account.
I was punishing myself for not being where I was ‘supposed to be’ or wanted to be.
From there, it wasn’t always a straight path ahead. When things finally began to feel stable, it all fell apart again when a whale client left. And then again a couple of years later when we had an embezzlement.
I was devastated. But from that rock-bottom place, I realized that I was living within a constricted scarcity mindset and bringing a lot of suffering onto myself.
I wondered what it would be like if I stopped feeling like I had to hold on so tightly and fearfully to money, and instead focus on that for which I was grateful: to put my attention to that which I already had, and not lament that which I didn’t.
Some days it was as simple as being grateful for waking up or taking another breath. But that shifted something in me and to this day is a foundational element for how I view the world. And as a result, I no longer feel constrained and money comes in with more ease.
I’ve also spent much of my life being a student of personal finance. I love this topic so much that I even wrote a kids’ book on financial literacy (you can see it here)!
In the hopes of helping you have less financial stress than I did, I rounded up 21 of the best tools and tips for your money into this free resource.
Money is a tool to which we give meaning. You decide how you want it to work for you and what you want your relationship with it to be.