Awareness Archives | Empathic Finance

Time to be intentional with your accounts

Verifying your accounts will keep your funds all accounted for, and will help you to decide if it’s time to change servicers.

It’s a new year, and with it the usual deluge of good intentions, lofty goals, and everything going more or less back to normal.

But with the new year, there are a few short financial tasks that I recommend people do now, sort of as a housekeeping ritual.

One of them is to make sure that you can access all of your saving, checking, and retirement accounts. That means logging into all of them, and then, determining what you’re doing with them.

The process doesn’t take long, and is important. Here’s why.

[Read more…]

Reflect on how much progress you’ve made

Awareness

Why and how to reflect on how far you’ve come, not just how far you need to go, so you can be stay motivated to continue.

I moved to New York City in 2003.

Life in NYC was hard, and my financial position didn’t make things much easier. I had some good months and bad ones, but I made $13 per hour in my first job there, which even in 2003 wasn’t very much.

Still, I kept track of my finances. I had to, as every dollar counted.

I have almost all of my notes to this day. But what I remember the most, what I can remember without even looking it up, is February 2004.

I remember that month because it was the hardest month for me, financially, in the entire time I lived in NYC, perhaps of my entire adult life.

That month, I recall I had less than $200 to spend. Total. For Expenses. On everything. On groceries, on visits to the drug store, on miscellaneous spending. Everything.

That’s $6 per day. In New York City. Where the sales taxes alone was upwards of 10%.

I remember how much I stretched everything that month. How I held my breath to make it work.

I had a credit card, and I confess that I could have charged a bunch on it to make getting through the month easier. But I knew how that movie played out. I would have to pay it back, with interest, making future months even harder. No thanks.

Now, I want to be clear: I never went hungry, I never was homeless, I never had any major life catastrophes like that.

I’m not even here to talk about how hard it was for me.

What I want to highlight is how far I’ve come since then.

And I want you to do the same for your life.

[Read more…]

Year in review 2019: Top 10 posts

Abundance, Awareness, Connection, Decisions, Movement, Radical Finances, Resistance

The top posts of the year on Empathic Finance, including both my favorites and the ones readers viewed most.

At the beginning of this year, I made a big change to this site.

After six years of blogging on a wide range of topics, not just personal finance but also technology and urban planning, I decided to relaunch the site as Empathic Finance, with a closer focus on emotion-focused financial literacy and healing.

I chose this mainly because this was the topic that I kept coming back to here, the one where I was the most passionate.

So I relaunched my financial coaching practice, and I also cut down to posting once a week, to allow for that and other projects.

But I’m still just as dedicated to this site as ever, helping you heal your relationship to money, and unblocking yourself from your goals.

So with the year ending, I wanted to take my yearly look back at some of the blog highlights.

In the past, I would devote one post to my top 10 favorite posts, and another to the top 10 most visited posts by you.

But since I’m only blogging once a week, I’m combining these this year to a single post and two “Top 5” lists. High Fidelity-style, if you will.

[Read more…]

Your income is not your value

Awareness

Our beliefs about income can be toxic. People who make more than you are not better than you, and they don’t have a higher value either.

I’m a huge fan of older video games, the ones made before 1990.

Some of those games, like Q*Bert, Ms. Pac Man, and Arkanoid, to name some of my favorites, my goal is simple: to get the high score.

There is something about seeing your name (or initials) at the top of the score board that I just love. Who would want to be at the top?

When you get the high score in Q*Bert. Source: Twitter

The problem happens when we extend this high score pursuit to areas where it isn’t quite appropriate.

Like your income. Which isn’t a score, although we often wrongly think it is.

[Read more…]

How would your life be different if you weren’t concerned about money?

Awareness

Your life may look very different if you weren’t concerned with making money. You should learn this now to help you be more intentional later.

Most of us have aligned our lives around the acquisition and protection of money in some way.

Yes, there is the rare person who whom they have gotten out of the race entirely of their own volition, and for those people I tip my hat (and wonder how they are making it work).

But for the rest of us, some portion of our decisions are based on either getting money or keeping it.

This came up for me recently, thinking about some work I was doing that didn’t particularly provide much in the way of satisfaction for me, and I wondered to myself: “If I didn’t need the money, would I still be doing this?“

The answer, unsurprisingly, was no.

And it made me think about just how much of my life was dedicated to pursuits that I wouldn’t bother pursuing if I wasn’t, well, pursuing money.

What about you?

[Read more…]

The ritual of the end-of-the-month budget freeze

Awareness, Radical Finances

When your budget has you run low on money at the end of the month, the upside is that it feels all the better when the new month begins.

Wow, this last month was tight.

I pretty much spent all of the money I had allocated for myself last month by about the 20th of the month.

A pity that the month doesn’t actually end on the 20th.

I slowly went into “budget lockdown” mode, cutting corners, using up supplies I had, and generally trying to spend as little money as possible, to get me through the month.

I made it through, but in order to make my Bills and Expenses equal my Income (as we all must do each month) I dipped into some savings. After all, savings can count as either a bill or an expense, depending on how you want to consider it.

I realized throughout this not-too-pleasant ordeal—after all, no one wants to not have money to spend—that there was a kind of ritualistic nature to the end-of-the-month budget freeze. That there was a purpose to all the discomfort.

[Read more…]

Is financial coaching the same in different countries?

Awareness

Our financial products may be different, but that’s not what’s important.

Most of my readers are from the U.S.

That’s not surprising. I’m from the U.S., and I talk about U.S. specific issues, from current events such as the 2016 presidential election and 2017 tax bill to more personal finance related topics like the Roth IRA and 401(k).

If you’re from France, you might be thinking to yourself: “what the hell is a 401(k)?”

(Actually, you’d probably be thinking “Mon dieu! Que se passe-t-il une 401(k)?“)

If you are from France, or Canada, or Cameroon, you may be tempted to tune this type of U.S.-centric talk as being Not For You.

But not so fast. Because so much of the Empathic Finance model knows no country borders.

[Read more…]

How to break the belief that it’s only okay to spend on your needs

Awareness, Decisions

You have much more control over what you define as wants and needs than you think.

Some people have a lot of trouble spending money.

I’m talking about the people who see spending as a “bad thing”, who feel shame when they have to part with their money.

For these people (and raise your hand if this sounds like you), money becomes a morality issue, and a very binary one: “spending is bad, not spending is good.” And this bleeds over into the self, in the way that we so often feel like we are what we do: “If I spend a lot of money, I am a bad person, and if I spend a little, I am a good person.“

That struggle is real. Imagine if every time you were confronted with a purchase, it was tied how good of person you were? (Many of you don’t have to imagine this.)

Unpacking this isn’t something one can do in a single blog post (or even a bunch of them); it’s something that’s done over time with a coach that specializes in the emotional side of finance.

But, I can offer you something to contemplate, which can have the effect of short-circuiting this train of thought, and lead to you to potentially relate to your purchases in a more less-judgmental way.

It refers to how we look at our “needs” versus “wants.”

[Read more…]

Remember: income and wealth aren’t the same thing

Awareness

Managing your money effectively matters so much more than your income.

Which is better to have, high wealth or a high income?

The question isn’t a good one, and lacks nuance, but it’s a good test, in case you think to yourself, “aren’t they the same thing?“

Nope.

You could be excused to think that if you possessed a high income, you’d be wealthy. I mean, it seems as obvious as the Monty Hall problem.

And, if you’re familiar with the Monty Hall Problem (in case you don’t know, it’s the brain teaser with the doors and the car and the goats), you know that what is obvious is also wrong.

[Read more…]

Why your goal is to not care about credit cards (if you even care today)

Awareness, Radical Finances

As you build wealth, the reasons to use credit cards fall away even more.

Recently I wrote about my own revelation that, while I love collecting (and using!) frequent flyer miles, eventually, with my own financial goals in place, I won’t need to care about them.

And the same goes for you too.

This is about allowing oneself to think bigger. What happens when you are financially successful? What happens when you have some real wealth? We spend so much time in the shallow end of the pool, working on our frugal strategies, that we can easily forget about that there’s a goal we’re working toward, which is to have more than enough. To be financially at-ease.

And so, what makes sense in your debt-filled, penny-pinching days may not make sense when your home is paid for and you’ve got income to spare.

But when you follow this train of thought through, another financial crutch starts to fall over: using credit cards.

When you have wealth, why bother? Let’s unpack this.

[Read more…]