The #1 Worry is....

What is your #1 worry in life?  Is it your family, health, relationships, your work, children, home, safety, retirement, or something else like losing control, being emotionally stable, or being liked by your friends?  The answer is none of these, and all of these.  How’s that for a trick question?  The answer is: it doesn’t matter what your #1 worry is.  “Say what?!”.  The reason it doesn’t matter is that we can do something about all of them at the same time.  What I’ve found is that all of these worries in life can be significantly reduced by appropriately handling the one thing that touches all of these categories.  It’s money.  Don’t believe me?  Think about this:  

Picture your top 2 or 3 worries: family, friends, health, work, children, and so on.  All of these are extremely important to us and it’s hard to narrow them down to just one as the most important.  However, money is the one category that is woven into all of the other categories in our lives.  Family/Relationships, Career, Emotional, Spiritual, Social, Physical, and Intellectual.  Money influences every one of these in one way or another.  So, it makes sense that if we are careless with our money, it impacts each of these areas negatively.  On the contrary, if we handle our money well and succeed with our personal finances, it should impact each of these areas in a positive way.  Think about all of the cool things you can do if you had money to spend and fall back on in each of these areas.  What would you do and see?  Where would you go?  Who would you help?  How could you change your community and family?  You see, money provides options.  Lack of money steals those options.  

Please don’t hear that I’m saying money should be the most important part of our lives or is to be somehow worshiped above all.  That isn’t what I’m saying.  I’m saying that money impacts every part of our lives and if we learn to handle money well and keep it in the right perspective, our lives can be dramatically improved, ultimately reducing our worry about these more important areas of life.  

We can all agree that our health is somewhere near the top of the list, right?  After all, if we don’t have our health, our life can’t be enjoyed to the fullest.  We all know someone who’s health has kept them from living to their potential.  Here’s an example of how money steals our options:  When you are sick with a cold or flu, what is the best thing to do for your body to heal and recover quickly?  If you answered “Rest”, you are right.  Our bodies need rest to heal quickly.  How many of us wake up in the morning feeling sick, and our first thought is “Oh man, I’m sick.  I better take it easy for the next few days and rest.”  Most of us have this thought, but just a few seconds later, we ignore that sound advice and talk ourselves out of bed, get ready for the day, and go into work feeling miserable.  Why?  Didn’t we just say that our health is one of the most important categories of our lives?  And didn’t we just say that rest is the best thing for us to do to get well?  Why didn’t we call in sick, stay in bed, and recover if that’s the best thing for us to do?    

Follow the train of thought to the reason we end up going to work and you’ll find most of the time, it comes down to money.  We don’t want to lose the income for that day or that week (of course there are times we are SO SICK we convince ourselves to stay home or even go to the doctor, but even that takes a lot of convincing – usually followed by some guilt.  But I’m talking about the times we make the choice to go into work feeling sick).  Loss of income produces pressure on our monthly cash flow because most of us don’t have extra income, or an emergency fund, and we live paycheck to paycheck with a ton of bills that we can barely cover.  A lower paycheck is considered a crisis so we lack the option to stay home and take care of ourselves.  

Now imagine you had a plan for your life and money.  You got control of your spending.  You saved an emergency fund, paid off your debts, and live on less than you make each month, which gives you extra cash flow.  You now have more options, don’t you?  In this scenario, missing a day here or there to take care of yourself doesn’t affect your finances negatively.  Good money management gained you the option to choose the more important thing: Taking care of your health.  If we don’t have money, we lose the choice to stay home and rest because we can’t afford to miss a single day of work.  The worry of that lack of money now causes us stress and anxiety.  Since our finances are a strain, our career is stressful, our health takes a step back, our family gets impacted negatively because we are not rested, and our social, emotional, and spiritual lives get turned upside down.  All due to the worry that creeps in, which could have been avoided by good money management.  This is just one example of keeping a balanced life and being aware of how our finances impact the rest of our lives.  Don’t get caught off guard and forced to make choices based on the worry of money (or lack thereof).  Set goals, make a plan, and execute that plan so you have money.  Money provides options, and options provide freedom to live the life you want to live.  We can help you learn these critical skills to win with money.