Money Matters

Because, you know, money matters.

I love being in my head, I love to write, and I love to write about what’s going on in our head – all the intangibles. But today I feel the need to address this most practical of topics.

The past few days I’ve been catching up with friends and family, which has been really lovely. One of the hardest things I find about living “far away”, despite all of our technological tools, is making time to actually connect with my inner circle. In the conversations I’ve been having these few days, there’s been a topic that seems to keep coming up: money. Oooooohh, I’ve opened a can of worms there, haven’t I?

“What does she mean? Where is she going with this?”, you might be asking.

What I want to say has particularly to do with women’s relationship with money, most especially her personal finances. Now, I’m not a CPA like my aunt. I’m not an investment wiz like my gal pal from high school. I’m not a tough-as-nails, take-no-prisoners CEO like my oldest girlfriend here in Munich. Nope. But I do believe that actively taking care of our financial health is just as important as any other self-care activities we participate in.

But I didn’t always have this view. I did the whole credit card debt thing in my 20s, even had to file for bankruptcy (ouch). My student loans aren’t entirely paid off yet (but I’m almost there). For years, even after I got married and we had kids I wasn’t very detailed-oriented when it came to dealing with our money. I mean come on, we’re artists, who has time for that?? We stayed within our means, saved for annual vacations, bought used cars, we were ok. But if you’re reading this, and you know anything about me, you know that most of the time ok isn’t good enough for me, I always want life to be inspiring and amazing and exciting. So why was I not applying this mindset to my finances??

Truth be told, I wasn’t very interested. I have a feeling many of you reading this could be in the same boat. Math was not my favorite subject in school, but I also didn’t suffer too much with it (though I would be perfectly content to never broach the subject of geometry ever again..). So what was my deal? The issue was my relationship with money. Money was what some people have, some people don’t, and it buys you stuff. Since I’d told myself that I’m not interested in stuff, it didn’t seem so important to have a lot of money. I’m more interested in beautifying the world, inspiring people, making a difference – but you know what I was missing? The more money you have, the larger your sphere of influence can be.

Money doesn’t change you, it only amplifies who you already are.

Let me say that again: money amplifies who you already are. And when I realized how much I believed in this statement, it lit me on fire. But where to begin? I’m not in a position to donate thousands to charities (yet!), to start a non-profit, to go build houses in developing countries. The place to begin, as with all things, is with yourself. You’ve got to take care of your house, before you can build one for anyone else. And ladies, this means we’ve got to take an active interest in it. If you’re single you got to be doing it anyway, if you’re in a relationship DON’T just hand it off to your partner and forget about it! “But Angela, I just don’t have the head for that kind of stuff” you say? Some tough love here: I call BS! That’s what calculators and technology are for. You can find a way that works for you, but we’ve got to be interested in getting it done. Yes, it will take your time. Yes, at first it might feel boring or painful. But think about what it would feel like to have a plan for your money. To know that you’ve got that topic buttoned-up, automatic, responsive and working for you. Take a sec, stop reading, think about it. I’ll wait…

STOP. Really think about it!

 

That feels good, right? We spend a lot of energy trying to make time for meal-planning, or exercising, or meditating, or even just to remember to do a full-body lotioning after a shower (today I forgot again, by the way). But for any number of reasons, many women struggle to, or outright avoid, making financial health a part of their self-care regimen. We are physical bodies in space. These bodies have requirements. We need money for those requirements. We are also conscious creatures that have intangible desires like justice or freedom. We need money to go get those too. Having a firm grasp of our money is imperative, ladies – for the life we want to have, and to create the world we want to live in.

So let’s take a look at our own financial house for a minute. When I first looked at mine, it seemed pretty good. Like I mentioned above, thankfully we are not in debt at all except my student loan, we don’t spend more than we earn, I actually track our receipts every month. All’s well, right? On the surface yes, but I wanted to dig deeper, I wanted to feel really in control of this situation. I never took a financial course in school, and because I am a nerd, I felt like a needed a book to lay things out, so I could make a sort of personal finance checklist to see where we stood. Quick Google search: voilá! I found any number of free personal finance courses, and books to choose from. I didn’t look long, and I tend to make decisions pretty quickly (for better or for worse) so I picked one that was actually being given at a community college in Texas. Since the course was geared toward college-age students, it really goes from the very beginning, but takes you all the way to planning for the end.

I got the book, and spent time literally going through each and every chapter. And you know what I found? I got affirmation that some of the basics actually are ok at our house. But I also discovered that I was insured for the same thing across two different companies (paying twice) and that our valuable property (think instruments and all that sheet music) wasn’t insured at all! I realized that we were doing ok for the moment, but what about the future? There was no plan in place. So I got crackin’. And if you’ve not done that yet: let me encourage you, with all the sisterly love in my heart, to do so.

Now, because I adore any excuse to play with Canva’s designing tools, and to get you started, I put together that personal finance checklist. By no means exhaustive and in complete laywoman’s terms because I’m no financial guru, you can at least give this a look over to see if there’s anything you might need to dig into.

Just click here to get it.

Then begin getting into whatever you’ve been neglecting. Put some care into it, just as you do with everything else in your life. We want to live on purpose, not by accident. We cannot afford to be passive about our money. We cannot see the future, so we have to prepare in the best way we can for whatever may come. When we take care of our money, we can direct it in the ways we want it to go and make IT work for US, not the other way around.

We are powerful, ladies. And if money is power, shouldn’t we be wielding it?? Drop me a line and let me know how you’re doing – if there’s anything I can do to support you in this, you know I will!