Did you know that one third of lottery winners end up broke? I don't know about you, but that is a lot more than I would have expected. I would have thought that with all that money, they would have been set for life, but on a deeper level, it makes sense. It doesn’t matter how much money you start out with, if you aren't careful, you can lose it. The last topic that I will be talking about is financial self care. Financial self-care is a form of self-care that focuses on managing your money in a healthy and intentional way to improve your overall happiness.
One way of achieving financial self-care is budgeting. There are many ways that you can budget. Budgeting involves taking your income and splitting it into two or more categories. For example, 50 percent of your money goes to savings, 20 percent goes into necessities (like bills), and 30 percent for things you enjoy. Budgeting helps you stay on your savings goals and helps take some stress out of spending since you know exactly how much you can spend. Budgeting also helps you spend your money intentionally. If you allocated seventy dollars to spend on fun things and you see a cool set of headphones for $69.99, while a different set of headphones is forty dollars, and you pick the $69.99 version, you will have no more money to spend on fun things. But if you pick the forty dollar set, you will still have thirty dollars to spend. It is important to find a good balance between being financially responsible and also spending money on things that you enjoy. After all, self-care is about preserving your own health, so it is important to get things that you enjoy.
Financial self-care is not a one time thing. You will not make the same amount of money forever and you will not spend the same amount of money all the time. To combat this, lots of people recommend that you track your spending. One of my favorite ways to help keep track of expenses is to make a Google Spreadsheet. With a column of income and expenses, along with the categories your expenses go in, it is easy to see the trendlines of your spending and what you spend the least and most on. There are many YouTube videos on how to code a budget spreadsheet. I recommend the video by Jeremy’s Tutorials on the subject.
The earlier you can start practicing financial self-care the better. That way, you can build good money habits early on while feeling good and knowledgeable about your spending habits, all the while reducing your stress about spending and saving money.
I hope that over the course of these eight columns, you have become more versed in the wonderful world of self-care. Each and every one of you are special and deserve to treat yourself well! There are so many more forms of self-care that I wish I could write about, I highly recommend researching more. I wish you all the best on the rest of your self-care journeys.