Ashley Feinstein

How to Reach Financial Bliss

We all hear and maybe even believe that personal finance is important.  You know you should know more about it, be spending less, saving more and planning for retirement.  You might even equate saving 10% of your paycheck with having five to six servings of vegetables a day… a commendable goal but it’s just not going to happen.  I’m here to offer you a new solution.  I’m here to offer you something much more powerful and dare I say more fun than trying to accumulate as much wealth as possible by restricting and agonizing over each penny spent.  That’s right.  I’m talking about financial bliss!

What is financial bliss?

Merriam-Webster defines bliss as 'complete happiness.'  Financial bliss is complete happiness around money.  When you have reached financial bliss you are in complete harmony with money.  Money doesn’t get in the way of you doing what you want to do in life, you spend money in ways that truly make you happy and your relationship to money is similar to that of a good friend.  You trust money will be there for you when you need it, in as much abundance as you need it and you let it come and go without worry.  Money just flows.  You feel relaxed, happy and fulfilled about the money in your life. Doesn’t that sound good?

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How do I get there?

Like Lewis Carroll said, 'If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.' The first step to reaching financial bliss is really defining what that vision looks like for you. Complete harmony with money looks very different for each of us. Take some time to really think what that would look like for you in common everyday situations.  Often it’s easier to start with what it doesn’t look like. Then you can build from there!

The next step is taking an honest look at your current money situation.  How is your earning and spending getting you closer or keeping you further from financial bliss?  A great way to do this is to keep a money journal for a couple weeks to get a realistic view of your spending.  We hardly ever spend what we think we spend so a money journal can be a very enlightening yet difficult process.  When you have a better idea of your spending you can plug the numbers into an annual budget.  Looking at numbers on an annual basis can be really surprising and informative.  It’s important to see how our spending stacks up over the course of the year. This happened to me.  On a daily basis, my $4.30 Grande Latte seemed like the perfect treat to get me to work in the morning but multiplied over 7 days and 52 weeks, it totaled over $1,500.  I decided to quit my Starbucks habit and take a trip to Europe instead.  I spent an amazing week in Barcelona with my cousin!  This is what financial bliss is all about.  It’s deciding what is important and maximizing your spending to really serve you and what you are looking to do and experience in life.

Take a few minutes and write down what a day of financial bliss would look like to you.  What would be different?  Commit to keeping a money journal for two weeks to get a more realistic view of your spending and see how that looks on an annual basis.  Does your spending line up with your vision of financial bliss? 

 

Ashley Feinstein is a certified money coach and founder of Knowing Your Worth, where she empowers her clients to live at the source of financial freedom by creating budgets that maximize happiness, reaching their financial goals, paying down student loans and other debt and increasing their credit scores. Find out more, check out her blog and follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

 

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