The Mental Fog of Understanding Money: The Simplest Steps to Clear Skies

2020 is a garbage year. Everything good is ruined by shitty people, from those that won’t help stop the coronavirus spread to those responding to the police brutality protests with… more police brutality. It’s a struggle to get through the mental fog these stressors bring to you, let alone when we pile on your personal struggles. In times like this, how is it possible to get through the mental fog around money and finance?

I’m feeling that fog too, which you can see from my tapering off of blogging as frequently as I did earlier this year. It makes me sadder to see so many other folks realizing financial literacy is something they’ve put off for far too long. While I have never before experienced this cacophony of disasters and reckonings, I have experienced living petrified of failure and of the near future.

Yes, during my Year of Fear and slight brushes with scarcity, but also before that in my childhood. Getting beaten with rags or punched in the mouth by your parents does not set you up for greatness. There were two main things that kept me going back then: reading (which also functioned as a great coping mechanism) and knowing my good grades would bank me college scholarships. I managed to stay out of that family situation by clearing the mental fog and making a plan to GTFO. Now it’s your turn to GTFO from underneath your own mental fog and money stressors. If you’re struggling to reach some kind of clarity around your personal finance, here’s some steps you should seriously consider.

Find Your Oomph

You can’t help someone who won’t help themselves. None of what I write here matters if you don’t use it. This is all on you and it doesn’t impact my life if you choose not to take it; not taking it only impacts yours. So what we need to do here is to find an answer to this question:

what’s your impetus?

Impetus being, what is the one thing that’s going to force you to see this through? What is it that’s going to keep pushing you to chase this knowledge? For some people it’s passion. Or spite, for others. For me it was fear, which is fine if you wield it smartly. Impetus isn’t the only thing you need, but it is what will keep you from giving up. Besides that you’ll need the desire to learn, the energy to stick with it, and the time to read or listen up on it. Sustaining all of that is freaking draining, so you need some special sauce to keep it together.

I know this because I had the impetus in 2016, when I finally started reading up on the math that went into judging a worthwhile investment. Everything I read that even remotely included a number or percentage caused my eyes to bounce off the screen and my thoughts to shut down. I don’t know if this was some weird mental block or I just didn’t have the neuron connections in my brain to properly study it. Oftentimes I’d be sitting at my receptionist desk staring at a blog article in front of me, my mind absolutely fried from nothing else but reading weird terms like “calculated return”.

But I kept at it. And I learned. And I reaped the benefits, as you may know.

Find what’ll keep you from stopping.

What else can that be?

The Playing With Fire documentary did a really cool thing with having you make a happiness list. Basically, write down the top 10 things that make you the happiest on a weekly basis. Go full Marie Kondo on your overall life and put to paper the greatest things in life that make you the happiest. The documentary’s subjects, Scott and Taylor, did this and realized two important things.

• The things that made them the most happy didn’t require an expensive city, and
• Their happiness was minimized by their incompatible lifestyle

While some of the things I mentioned above can be good motivators, the best one to have is hope. Don’t drag me for being cheesy, this really carries weight. Passion can wane, spite can get toxic, and fear can swallow you whole. Hope is so much more sustaining and nourishing for the soul. And also the perfect tool to snip right through the mental fog to battle your money woes.

If you can’t think of something to add to the list, that’s okay too. Think on what would make you happy, if you were to get it. If I had to make a happiness list in high school, “planning for the future” and “dreaming” would have made it onto that list. It’s good to plan for happiness in the future through your goals and dreams; in fact, it’s an essential part of your personal finance journey.

Set Aside Time

You’re starting to cut through that mental fog around money; since that won’t happen overnight (as awesome as that’d be) you’ll need to make time for it. Even in times of quarantine and staying at home we mentally check out with several hours of TV, social media, and gaming. It’s not a bad thing to indulge in these things, but it is when you’re spending over 20% of your day on just those things.

Schedule out some time to take a look at this stuff. Reward yourself before and after for doing so; make the after rewards a nicer one, since you catch flies with more honey than vinegar 😉

As one of the greatest 80s films will tell you, there’s a time for everything. Take time to unwind and relax to recharge your batteries. Take time to take care of your body and mind.

And for the purposes of this article, take the time to plod through financials.

Banishing the Mental Fog Around Money

My most unshakable belief in humanity is how crucial education is to our progress and our peace. In the personal finance sphere, you might have a massive blind spot (aka the core of your mental fog) in how you actually deal with money. So kick that out of the door yesterday.

You likely know how much money you make. Now compare that to how much you spend. If you don’t know, track it for a couple months and see what you spend money on. That’s really helpful in telling you if you’re doing good or not. If you need further help on conquering the basics, the Reddit finance whizzes have made a nifty graph for helping you along.

The more you peruse the abundant resources out there, the more likely you’ll find your core authors that speak the best to what you want in your money situation. If they’re still actively putting out new content, even better. Between staying on top of your finances and seeing how others do what you want to, you’ll suddenly start to see what steps you can take to mimic what they did. For me that included jumping on up to high-paying jobs and creating the best investment strategy for me (hint: index funds all the way).

Absorbing all of this on a regular basis does wonders for shifting your mindset. Before you know it you’ll find your thoughts around money to be suddenly fog-free.

What else is good for getting rid of mental fog around money?

Image credit: Evelyn Mostrom via Unsplash