Raise your hand if you’ve felt the cold grip of financial fear wrap it’s way around your heart, and wake you up at 4am to freak the fuuuuuuck out about money.
You’re not alone. Americans rate financial stress as one of their top two stressors, and there is a lot of fear mixed up in that anxiety. Many Americans fear of not having enough money to retire on. There’s fear around actually getting started on making change in their financial lives.
Financial fear is hard to live with, but it’s also hard to face it down and say ‘Not today.’
I know what you’re thinking: it’s hard enough to get emotionally vulnerable with people in our lives. Now, Kara, you want me to expose my financial fear too? Why don’t I just shout my weight from the rooftops and also invite over the whole neighborhood to watch me pop my next zit?
Ask Kara: I’m Feeling Financial Fear and I Hate It.
What is Financial Fear?
Financial fear is that creepy-crawly feeling that sits in the pit of your stomach and asks “How are you going to manage this?” This, of course, being your entire financial life.
How are you going to pay that debt? How are you going to find a higher paying job? When will you learn about investing and harness it to make more money? When will looking at your credit card bill not lead to feeling out of control?
Financial fear is common, it’s terrible, and I wish it upon no one. It’s a part of being financial anxiety, and it’s a huge block to actually getting that control of your money that you so desperately want.
More on financial anxiety here:
How My Financial Anxiety Turned Into Financial Confidence
Financially Secure YOLO: How to Live Well and Thrive Financially
Feel The Financial Fear and Do It Anyway
To paraphrase Susan Jeffers, you have to feel the financial fear and DO GOOD MONEY THINGS ANYWAY.
If you let financial fear run your life, you’ll never escape that sinking feeling that you’re messing up.
Fear is a terrible place to make decisions from. It says to us “You do not have enough. You are not enough. You will never be able to do that thing.” That’s not the uplifting, abundant thinking that we want for you!
Financial fear holds us back. So the first step is to face the fear and identify it. What are you afraid of? Get as specific as you can. Use your budget (or snag ours here if you don’t budget yet) to highlight the areas of your money that stress you out the most.
“I’m afraid to spend money” might, upon a deeper look, actually be “I’m afraid that if I spend this money I am never going to get it back.”
Now we know that you don’t feel like there is enough money coming into your life, that you don’t feel confident managing your money, and that spending money is a fear trigger for you. We can work with that! All of those things can be changed. (That’s what we do in our money coaching sessions.)
By facing the fear we’ve named it. And by naming it we’ve begun to create a plan to change it.
Doesn’t that feel good? Don’t you feel a weight already lifted from your shoulders? You’ve taken back some of your control- you’re showing the fear who’s the HBIC.
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