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.