mindset

What I’m asking you is to just consider for a moment that there may be more to the story than meets the eye. You make fun of their fancy car, but what if they inherited that car from a parent who recently died?

Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize last year for showing that not only do humans make financial mistakes, they make predictable mistakes. He joked about calling his research ‘Dumb Stuff People Do.’ But today, it’s called ‘Behavior Economics,’ and it has changed public policy across the world.

They’re kind of like an actor’s script in a movie. We just continue to read the lines in our heads or out loud to our family and friends, and believe that they’re true! When in fact, they are often quite distorted, and can limit our success or even hurt us. For most of us, our money scripts are unconscious, but they drive all of our financial behaviors.

In a year, you’ll be 38 times a good if you get one percent better each day. That seems like a such a crazy number — it’s just to illustrate the power of compounding.

Basically, it boils down to this: despite having a good education and a respectable job, you feel like you are a fraud, a fake, an impostor. On the outside, you might look calm, cool and collected, but if others only knew what a hot mess you really were!

Now that I’m debt free, I wonder at the complacency with which I approached my debt. Why did it take me so long to want to get out from under it?

The poverty mindset and fear that I’ve carried for 28 years ruined my health, destroyed my faith and knocked me off my destined path multiple times. Not because I truly had something to fear but because I thought I had something to fear.

Michelle has been learning, thinking, writing, researching and speaking about money management for decades. Yet the most important education she received, she says, came from the lessons her grandmother taught her.

It takes conscious effort to look seriously at things beyond the immediate future. You have to train yourself to start considering the long-term consequences of your daily choices and use them as a pro-and-con with those immediate choices.

Whenever I tell myself ‘I can’t afford this,’ I feel a little sad or frustrated, and so what I want to do is be aware that this is a thought—a Jackal—when actually, there is a choice, right? I’m choosing not to buy something because I want to spend my money on my rent. I don’t want to spend my money on this car because I can get a second-hard car and I prefer to spend the rest of my money on the gym. There is a choice there.

I believe we are meant to live in community and that means sharing our secrets, heartaches, hopes, dreams, struggles, finances, and goals.

My awareness of and dedication to becoming debt free and financially independent has blossomed over the past year or so, and it’s important to look back and be appreciative of the situations that have allowed me to find success.

But, while frugal living is often a difficult way to achieve goals, there are plenty of painless money-saving tips for everyday life to get started. Once you’ve started with these smaller actions, you might start to feel a shift in the way that you think.

Feeling shame can affect the way we live our lives, and especially how we spend our money.

Only when an outside force thrusts itself upon us, like an unexpected illness, losing a loved one, maybe an unexpected pregnancy, losing a job, an investment plumpting—these terrible circumstances (it’s typically a crappy circumstance)—that we actually truly wake up from our slumber—our drift—and we start to ask these more existential foundational questions about ‘what am I doing?’ ‘what am I committed to?’ and ‘am I connected to purpose?’