Managing Money Anxiety

​The holiday season and Christmas can be a great time of year but it can also be an expensive time of year. In fact, on average Americans spent more than $900 on Christmas this year!

In this blog post I’m going to share some resources that can help you stay on track with your money goals. Financial health and education is very important to our mental health and emotional wellness. I have heard from numerous clients worries and stress about money. In fact, financial stress is huge contributor to stress in marriages and relationships.

Most of us have heard about the importance of budgeting and tracking our money. But the idea of writing down each individual expense by hand in a notebook or Excel sounds incredibly tedious and time consuming for me. For those of you that do this, I admire your dedication!  However, I know that I would not be able to sustain tracking my budget by hand and I would avoid looking at my finances. This would defeat my goal of having more financial awareness and less financial anxiety.

A free resource that can help streamline budgeting and tracking expenses is Mint (https://www.mint.com/). It’s completely free and created by the same company that does Quickbooks so we can trust that it’s a reputable and secure program.  You can have Mint automatically download your transactions from all of your credit cards and banking accounts and then you can create rules to automatically sort these into easily trackable expenses.

For example, if I know that all of my Costco expenses are groceries, I can create a rule for Mint to automatically put all Costco transactions into the grocery category. If there are individual exceptions, I can easily go in and edit this.  The program is very user friendly and easy to use and I have found it very helpful to see what my actual spending is each month versus what I think I have spent. How many times have we asked ourselves, Where did all my money go this month? Now you can easily see where it went! You can create budgets for yourself with numerous categories and adjust these budgets as needed.  In sum, tracking your money and creating budgets is an important part of financial wellness and finding a program such as Mint that can save you time and energy doing this is key.

Another important piece of financial health is education. There are numerous free resources online and a quick Google search can direct you to several sites. One of my favorite sites for financial education is https://www.moneyunder30.com/ . While their marketing is directed to people under age 30, I have found their material educational for all ages and very helpful.

Another resource is your bank. Some banks have free educational videos and seminars for their members that can help with skills such as budgeting, money management, buying a home, saving for children's’ college education, investing, and planning for retirement.  Some banks even provide free consultation services with a financial planner. For example, one of the local credit unions BECU offers financial education online at https://www.becu.org/members-matter/education. Next time you are at your bank ask them about what financial education services are available to you.

I hope you found this information helpful, thanks for reading and Happy New Year!
-Rondale