10 Reasons Why You Are Awful at Managing Your Finances

Feeling a sense of unease about our finances is something that’s familiar to us all. Whether it be the day to day mundane chores of paying an exorbitant phone bill or car repayment, or the long term prospects of stock portfolio and superannuation savings, many of us succumb to our economic anxieties and push these responsibilities to the back of our minds. We’re far too busy today. Maybe next month.

Too often we conflate our external affluence with our internal self worth. Much of our apprehension and angst does not come from the realities of our financial prospects, but rather the way in which we think and feel about them.

At the moment we need to be most vigilant over our finances, it seems that many of us have given up hope.

The following is a list of ten reasons why today, you’re awful at managing your finances.

1. You hate finance. You think it’s confusing. You find it alienating. It’s confounding. Yet you love the rewards it brings and the opportunities that your money affords you. Here in lies a problem.
2. You’re a hard worker and suffer the stress that your ambition and drive creates. When the weekend rolls around there’s money in the bank but your energy levels are bankrupted. Your work/life balance is one of your most valuable commodities.
3. Working Monday to Friday, deadline to deadline, places you in a finite and limited mindset. You need to introduce long-term financial planning into your short-term routine. I’m no architect but I’m pretty sure Rome wasn’t built in a day.
4. You try to keep up with the Joneses. Who are the Joneses? I don’t even know any Joneses! Your money is simply a conduit to the experiences and memories that make you happy, which are as individual and unique as you are.
5. You’ve fallen into the trap of impressing others with your outward material worth. Yet the irony is that your peers are as self involved and insecure as you are. It will come as a shock to realize how little others care about the label on your suit or the model of your phone.
6. You’ve become adept at outsourcing your financial responsibilities, offering them up to the fate of the markets. When finances are good, the stars have aligned. When losses occur, fate has conspired against you. Loose the superstition and take ownership of each and every outcome, both positive and negative.
7. You think a rich and valuable lifestyle is necessarily born from your bank balance. Take a weekend hike, a midnight bike ride, visit an art gallery, swim in the ocean, read a classic novel, picnic in the park with your friends. When looking back on your fondest memories, you often realize that they never demanded the expenditure you expected.
8. You think that your superannuation can wait. Enjoying your youth and responsible and strategic planning for your retirement are not mutually exclusive.
9. You work forty, fifty, sixty hours a week but refuse to spend thirty minutes reviewing your finances. Regularly allocating this short period of time to your long-term prospects will equate to thousands of extra dollars in the bank over the course of your career.
10. You’ve just read and agreed to every single one of these points, realizing that you’re failing in every single one! Don’t worry, I did the same. It’s time for us to make a change.