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Before we start today, I just wanted to let you know about an exciting project that I’m launching in January to help you kickstart your finances and get into the right frame of mind for 2021.
I have teamed up with Nicola at The Frugal Cottage to bring you The Feel Good Finance Club. This programme, running through around January is a 31-day accountability and support programme that we will be running through Facebook. It will have daily prompts community support, and every Friday at 8 pm we will be doing a new workshop about the topic of the week.
Now, you can get your hands on all of this for just £7. I will drop the link in the show notes to make it really easy for you to find it. But for just £, you can get your finances off to a great start in 2021. We look forward to seeing you in The Feel Good Finance club.
Hello, and welcome to Confidence Counts. The podcast that builds your money confidence and sets you free from money anxiety. I’m your host; money confidence coach and personal finance blogger Charlotte Jessop.
With every episode, you can expect ideas on how to feel in control of your finances. Understand how your money works, and develop strategies to live life without money worries. We will talk all things budgeting, frugal living, money mindset, investing, goal setting and more. as we journey together to build our money confidence. Don’t forget to hit subscribe, so you can stay up to date with the latest episodes. I’m glad you could join me enjoy the show.
Hello, and welcome to confidence counts episode number 22. I think it’s number 22 anyway. But more importantly, this episode is going out on Christmas day. So Merry Christmas, if you are listening to this on the big day.
This is Christmas 2020, which I’m hoping is going to be the weirdest Christmas and actually, Christmas 2021 is going to be a bit more back to normal, or at least a bit better than this one.
It’s been a weird year. I’ve had a bit of a tough week in terms of feeling a bit trapped and a bit stuck indoors and things like that. Generally, it has been fine. We’ve been out, we’ve done some shopping (some food shopping) and bits and pieces like that.
So generally it has been good, but the husband’s been out at work and it has been me and the kids. So it’s been a bit of a struggle trying to entertain us all, and keep the peace, but we’re good. It is nearly Christmas for me because I’m recording this in advance. I haven’t got up out of bed early just to record this podcast on Christmas Day. So excitement is high in my household.
I thought we’d go for a really positive podcast today. And before I start, I just want to remind you to subscribe to this podcast. There’s going to be another one going out on New Year’s Day and I want to make sure that you get every episode. I’ve got some great content lined up for you in the New Year. And I want to make sure that you get it and that you get access to all of it. So make sure you hit that subscribe button, let your friends know about it, get them in on it. Get them changing their financial futures. We’re going to get really confident with our money in 2021 and I want you and everybody else who wants to change their financial position along for the ride.
Today I want to talk about money positivity. This is something that probably doesn’t get talked enough about. We talk a lot about the ins and outs and the technicalities of different financial options and bank accounts and savings accounts and investing and all these sorts of things. But do we actually talk enough about our mindset and the way we think about things and the underlying psychology behind our finances?
The first question that I would like to put to you is, how do you talk to yourself about money? What things do you say to yourself? Back before I was doing this job: the podcast, the YouTube channel, the website, all of those things, I was a teacher. A maths teacher and I used to hear all the time: I can’t do maths, I don’t like maths. You know my mum can’t do maths, my dad can’t do maths, my dog can’t do maths. Therefore I can’t do maths.
It was a big problem within the department and within the maths teacher world we were trying to tackle some of these preconceived ideas about maths. Now we don’t say things like, “I can’t read. My mum can’t read. My dad can’t read.” If it was true, and it’s okay if it is, but if it was true we wouldn’t be saying out loud. But yet it’s almost fashionable. It’s seen as acceptable to be bad at maths. And it’s almost okay for people to be bad with money.
People will often message me and say things such as “oh yeah I just spend a lot. I love spending” and “I’m in debt. I put it on the credit card. It doesn’t matter” or “I just went over the top there” or “I’ve got no idea what’s going on with my pension,” or “it’d be good if I could get some savings, but I can’t really do it.” And these are all negative messages that we are sending, not only into our communities and into our friendship groups, but also to ourselves.
We are repeating these statements over and over again, and therefore we are making them true. We are continuing this message in our own brains. If we say once we can say it again and then once we said again it’s even easier to say the next time.
Let’s try and rewire some of that messaging into something positive. rather than saying those negative things, can we say something positive instead?
We also need to reflect on our actions. So, all the things that we do, the actions that we take around our money also have an impact on how we perceive money. If you’re the sort of person that doesn’t budget, you literally let the money hit your account and spend it but you’ve got no idea what your bills are. You’ve got no idea when the next lot of money’s coming in, or you don’t make any plans for your financial future so maybe you haven’t thought about your pension. You’ve got no savings, then what message re you telling yourself about money?
You might be in this situation because you have had a bad experience in the past with money and you are scared to embrace it. Or maybe you’re just continuing in the same way that you have your whole life. Your money deserves better than that.
Think about if you bought a house plant. I’ve got several house plants. So I want you to imagine that you bought a house plant. You love house plants. But then, once in your home, you just decided to ignore it. You did nothing with it. You don’t water it, put it near a window or get some sunlight or you don’t read the instructions about how to care for it. You just basically ignore it.
You appreciate looking at it. You appreciate the impact that it has in your room and in your home, but actually, you do nothing to nurture it. Well, that is what so many of us do with our money. We appreciate it and we like it being there, but actually, we do nothing to help it grow and to make it transform into something even more beautiful or even just a stick around. We want that houseplant alive and we want our money to stay in a healthy position too.
The actions we take are important to us, in terms of our perceptions and how we feel about money and how money will work for us in the future.
It’s Confidence Counts so that means you’ve got three tips to work on some of these things. If you’re not particularly money positive, then, now is your chance to turn that around.
Number one,: I want you to create some positive money statements.
So, rather than “I’m not good with money” or “I can’t save” changes into something that is positive. You could say “money flows easily to me” or “I find it easy to save money.” Something like that, or “it is safe for me to have a big bank balance.” These are all positive money statements. They’re statements about money that we want to be true. So we’re going to say these things to ourselves.
We can even say something like “I’m good at managing my money” and you might not feel like they’re true at the moment but if we say them enough times we start rewiring the messages that we are giving to ourselves, and they will slowly start to become true.
So when you do this, I want you to focus on positive outcomes. So I don’t want you to say things like, “I don’t want to be in debt,” because not only are you using negative language but you also focus in on the thing that you don’t want. You don’t want the debt, and you’ve made that a big part of your positive statement.
Instead, you could say something like,” I am financially free,” or “all my money is mine to spend on the now and the future.” These are forward-looking statements. They are very much tied to the fact that you don’t want your debt anymore, but also they are looking at things that you want to achieve. The situations you want to be in rather than old situations that you want to get rid of.
You can make them very specific to you to think about the things that may be an issue for you and address those things. They don’t have to be generic ones. They could be things that are important to you. So it could be, “I’m going to travel the world and pay for it all myself” if that’s what you want to do. You can make that a statement and make a statement that is tailored to you and your specific wants and your goals.
Then repeat them say them to yourself. Maybe you’re making a cup of tea and you could say “I look after my money.” Make that something you say every time you make a cup of tea. Perhaps you will even think of that statement when you next go to make a cup of tea after listening to this podcast.
We need to make it a habit. Make these things that we say to ourselves and say to our friends and family too.
The next one is to start building systems. We’ve talked about how your actions are also important and how they feed into our thoughts and feelings about money. And so we need to build some systems that actually work in our favour as well. How do you actually look after your money? What steps do you take to make sure that your money does what you wanted to do and is well catered for?
So could you start a budget, could you actually pay attention to the money that’s coming in and the money that’s going out and making sure it goes to all of the right places? Could you set up some automation, could you set up a monthly amount that goes into your savings account or could you speak to your employer about increasing your pensions contributions?
Another thing to consider is also tracking your income. :ook at where all the money comes from. Many of us think that the only source of income that we have into our lives is our salary, the money that we get from work. Actually, you might find if you start looking at your bank balance the money comes from all sorts of different places, you might get an interest payment, you might get a refund on something that you wasn’t expecting, you might get some gifted money or somebody might pay for part of your takeaway or something like that. All sorts of strange places that money could come from.
When we start tracking our income (and this can be something as simple as a spreadsheet), I write it in there. It’s not a formal document. It’s separate from things like my business account. It’s a way of me tracking the money that shows up in my life.
This creates you as this person that genuinely cares about your money. When you start caring about your money, you will start looking at ways that you can grow it and you can attract more of it, and build greater income streams and be financially aware and financially confident.
The third one is to check the messages you are saying to yourself and to others. This is in line with the first point about creating positive money statements. But I want you to start to notice the negative things you are saying, and every time you feel like you’re having some sort of negative reaction.
Maybe you see a friend who gets a promotion and you are feeling a bit resentful about that. Just see where that’s coming from and see why you think that negative thought, and what you can do to actually address it and turn it into a positive thing.
You might see these behaviours in your friends and in your family as well, and pull them up on it. You could “just because x y and z have gone on that fancy holiday doesn’t mean that’s not something we can work towards achieving as well.
Flip those negative feelings, those negative statements, and those negative voices in your head, and turn them into something positive. You could even then create a positive statement that becomes part of your repertoire of positive money statements and you start repeating it to yourself and you start making it true.
It’s quite interesting when you look at those negative emotions to see how they actually come up in your life. Why are you feeling those things? What is it about that particular situation that triggered that reaction in you? Then work on addressing that as well. Why do you feel like that? Where has that come from? Then you know what you need to do to let go of or move on from to actually stop feeling like that in the future.
So that’s it, I’m giving you this gift of money positivity for Christmas 2020, and I hope that it will serve you well into the new year.
Now, just a reminder, this was mentioned at the start of the podcast, but we are going to be closing the doors for The Feel Good Finance Club on the first of January, in the evening. This is a fantastic opportunity to really tackle your finances head-on. If you’re thinking, I don’t do a budget, I have no idea about savings, I’d really like to increase my income in 2021, but I have no idea where to start, then this could be the programme for you. And the best bit is that it’s only £7.
There are lots more details on my website, so if you go to lookingafteryourpennies.com/finance-club/ you will see all the information there and you can grab your ticket. Like I say, it’s only £7 for 31 days of content so totally affordable.
Anyway, that is it for Episode Number 22 of this podcast. I am so glad that you’ve joined me today. I hope you have a fantastic day and I will see you in 2021. The next episode of this podcast will be going out on the first of January 2021. And let’s get excited about it, you know it’s gonna be the new year. Let’s have something to look forward to next year, right, and Confidence Counts is it.
Thank you again for listening to this episode. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and I would absolutely love it if you fancy leaving me a five-star rating and a review to let me know what you think. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Confidence Counts. I’ll be back next week for another episode with more tips and ideas to help you build your money confidence. Don’t forget to hit subscribe and share with your friends.