Are you Scared of your Money?

By Matt - Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

_{Photo by Stuant63}

Emotions and money go hand in hand but it’s something that people fail to think about when it comes to their finances. Most finance books that talk about investments suggest that we keep our investments in vehicles that we are comfortable with. Having no money causes us fear because of the lifestyles that we have become accustomed to. When you’re heavily in debt and collection agencies are calling you hesitate to pick up the phone when its a number you don’t recognize. Conversely if you happened to win the lottery and money is in vast abundance you don’t worry about it and you’re happy with everything you can spend it on. Money and emotions are tied together because of the deep impact that it has on our day to day livelihood.

Personally I would have to admit that I am afraid of my finances. I have been trying to keep a budget for the better part of two years but for some reason I haven’t gotten a hold of my debt. It hasn’t grown at all but it definitely hasn’t decreased very much. I worry about being able to pay all of my bills on time and in this tough economy I am very conscious of the impact loosing my job could have.

Why are we afraid of our money?

There are a number of reasons why I would say we’re afraid of our money and they’re each as unique as we are as individuals.

loosing your house
loosing your job
being able to feed yourself and your family
continuing to live the lifestyle you’re accustomed to

This list can continue for pages but the reality is we live our lives a certain way, regardless of what it is, and we want to keep living it this way. To do this we need to have a certain amount of money coming into our bank accounts. If you were to take away this money you instantly have to take away at least parts of the lifestyle. In my opinion its natural to want to keep the lifestyle you live but unfortunately our consumer society suggests that we spend more money than we make and we use credit to get what we want.

In tough times looking at your finances when there is little or no money can bring lots of anxiety and that is a perfectly natural reaction. Do you fear your finances? What do you do to get over this fear? I’ll post my approach to my fear tomorrow but I’d love to hear your thoughts, you can email me at matt@onemillionandbeyond.com as I still haven’t gotten the comments fixed (yes more complacency).

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