Has my psyche to money been tripping me up?

I am sure everyone at some point has said I will be responsible or will start saving when I earn enough money. I said it and recently heard my 22 year old cousin say it because he is currently in a learnership and not earning much. The problem though with that thinking is if you don’t develop a healthy relationship with money when you are earning a little it becomes really hard to do the right thing as your earnings increase. As the ‘Parable of Talents’ from the bible(Matthew 25:14 – 30) rightly said it “to those who use well what is given, they will have abundance. But for those who do nothing, even the little they have will be taken away” . There are more of these believes that trip us up, so let’s explore them.

I can’t stick to a budget therefore I am bad with money

We are built different, there are those people who obsess over the details of the budget in a spreadsheet with detailed line items of where which portion of the money goes (I am one of them). And if you are not the above personality and you try to budget , when your groceries are R1,200 and you budgeted R1,000 you automatically think you are not good with budgeting. The truth is the core of budgeting lies in Total Income – Savings/Investment – Fixed Costs (i.e. Costs that don’t change often e.g. Rent) – Variable costs (i.e. costs that change based on inflation of where you buy e.g. Food). So, if you focus on this methodology you don’t have to stress about being R200 over on groceries, you just need to ensure that you adhere to your total variable costs balance at the end of the month. Set yourself up to win by operating based on your personality, the results are the same.

I want to enjoy my life now

The thing about life is you can have everything but you can’t have all of it at the same time. My husband has a cousin who lives by the mantra ‘life is too short so why save‘, so he is always travelling and is very spontaneous. At face value he looks irresponsible but if this makes him happy and he is not a person who thinks buying a decent home or car is important to him, then the only fault in his plan is if something happens to him and everyone around him has to help out because he never thought saving was important (let’s hope he at least has a funeral cover, because that is an expensive event in the black community). While on the other hand if you are the type of person who wants fancy things but can’t afford all of them currently then unfortunately you need to practice delayed gratification to be able to achieve your goals. Think about the tradeoffs between what you want and what you can get while executing for the future.

I am supposed to always help because I am the “financially stable” one in the family or group

Financial enablement is defined as financial help that hurts e.g. Giving money to people who are mishandling money or people who we know they are not going to pay you back. This is a weird one for black people because our culture tells us that we need to always help each other. The truth is if you are feeding a bad behavior, then you are actually hurting not just the recipient but you are also hurting yourself because that money could have been used for other things. Reaching a healthy balance to assist without hurting yourself or reinforcing bad behavior will take time but it is necessary.

How do we unstick ourselves? 

If you realize that you are not where you want to be with money, or you keep tripping yourself up about money. Firstly, be mindful about your personality traits so that you can be aware of what works or doesn’t work for you and then let’s invest in educating ourselves about how to change, then most importantly let’s take action to apply what we learned to be better.

If we need financial independence , we need to face our issues head on. Maya Angelou said it best “Stepping onto a brand-new path is difficult but not more difficult than remaining in a situation which is not nurturing to your whole being”