Don't Be Afraid of Your Finances!
Tip #1 - Schedule Time for Personal Finance
Discipline beats out motivation over the long term, and if you are reading this, there is a good chance you don’t have much of a motivation to look at your finances, so choose discipline! The easiest way to progress through discipline is to use your phone alarms and calendars to set aside time for what needs to be done, and sticking to that schedule. What you end up doing with that time depends on your goals. For some, it could be just paying off the credit card statement. For others, it may involve making a budget spreadsheet and updating it for spending to ensure not too much is being spent. In any circumstance, if you aren’t regularly looking over your finances, it may be a great idea to block some time on your schedule to start. You’ll be surprised how much a small, consistent time commitment can get you!
Tip #2 - Get More Exposure
In the modern age of social media and the availability of content, there is no shortage of ways to get learn about the world around you. While you may not be inclined to do a deep dive on Investopedia to discover new terms, you can set yourself up to get exposed to the ideas by having that content in your feeds. Here are some ways you can get more exposure and become more comfortable with the scary world of personal finance:
Subscribe to a YouTube channel
Follow pages on social media: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc.
Subscribe to newsletters
Talk to your friends that are financial professionals (if you have any)
Read some blogs (like this one!)
Be careful! Don’t try to get yourself interested by overloading your feeds with content from every page you see. There are many channels, pages, and websites that create sensational headlines and empty content to get you to click that don’t help you. Pick out the content you want to see and make sure it’s a meaningful part of your day.
Tip #3 - Stay Organized
One of the reasons that you might not like personal finances is because it can be such a burden to get everything together when you finally do look at it. Not everyone keeps folders of their tax information, business receipts, bank statements, credit card statements, and order confirmations neatly in secured folders on their computer or on the cloud. While doing all of these things is likely overkill for many, getting into the habit of uploading important documents to the cloud or storing them in an easy-to-find place would eliminate the friction and frustration that many people have when they finally decide to look into their finances. The easier it is to access your information when you need it, the easier it will be to analyze it, so do yourself a favor and keep your documents in a secure, but quickly accessible place.
If you know that you need to pay more attention to your finances, try one or more of these strategies and see if you find yourself in a better position to succeed!