Money: it's a mood thing. Feel good about your love life, your job, the weather, and no worries. Get criticised by your boss, dumped by your boyfriend/girlfriend, fed up with the rain, and your head is full of money worries. Want to do something about it?
The truth is that money has no shape, colour or smell. Money can be green or dirty, serious or funny, black or mad. We make it that way just by the way we feel about it. And the way we feel about it shapes our behaviour, especially the way we spend and save.
So if you want to change your money habits, you have to start with what's in your head.
Let's take the classic: feeling a bit stressed or depressed, so go out shopping and spend more than you intended to on something you don't really need. We've all been there. And actually, so long as it doesn't happen that often or make a black hole in the finances, no big deal - the activity takes your mind off the problem and you end up feeling better, so in that sense it is 'retail therapy'. But if it's a habit, and is contributing to a gap between income and expenditure, or even worse causing you to rack up debt, then it's a problem that needs sorting.
The real issue behind this and many other money problems is that you're being driven by your moods or feelings. And the even more real issue is that you can't change your mood or feelings when you want to. But you can learn to influence your moods and avoid being swept away by them. I'm going to set out three strategies for doing that, each of which suits different types of people.
Let the body do the talkingThe real problem with the negative mood or feeling is that it churns. It goes round and round like a load of dirty washing. You're telling a horror story to yourself over and over. You have to get out of that machine cycle. Get into your body instead.
I"ve never yet seen a survey on this but I would bet serious money that only a small minority of people who go to the gym three times a week have money worries. Or people who jog every day, or play a sport regularly. Making a physical effort gets you out of your head and the machine switches off or at least goes into sleep mode.
If you can't do that, here's something almost everyone can do: Walk. Walk FAST. Walk faster than your normal walk, so fast it's an effort, for 20 minutes. Do it every day: on the way to work, or getting a lunchtime sandwich, or on the way home. It'll work best if you don't stop but keep going for 20 minutes. In addition to switching the worry machine off, you'll probably learn something about your habitual walk and may end up with a better, more fluid and comfortable normal walk.
What's the point? Some of us only learn by doing. You can change your mood by what you do. Subconsciously you learn that you can apply this principle in other ways.
Count it outForget the money. What have you really got? Do a real mental inventory of all your possessions. Yes, all that stuff: the house, the car, the furniture, the kit, the CDs, the clothes, the gadgets... you'll be surprised how hard it is to get near the end of the list. Be remorseless: you're not allowed to say "Oh, X doesn't count". It ALL counts: it's all stuff you've got, whether you want to have it or not.
The trick with this one is not to get diverted into thinking about why or when you acquired something - those are distractions. Just stick to running through the list.
Unless you're a hermit, you won't do this in one hit. So do your clothes as a list, your kitchen stuff, your gadgets or sports kit, your loft or garage.
Sounds tedious? Yes, but fascinating too, in a macabre kind of way, like looking through a trunkful of stuff left by a dead relative. Which is kind of the point: you're going to leave this stuff behind too.
Can you imagine feeling delight in recalling every single thing you own?
What's the point? Stuff is less important than you think. So is money. Your ideas and feelings don't agree about this. You need to educate them.
It's not only meNegative money moods are just like other negative moods: they're all about me. I've screwed up, they've screwed me over, I can't help it, I ought to, I ought not to, I should have, I shouldn't have.
If you're strapped for cash or have debt problems or times are hard, it's easy to get into this state and once you're in it it's hard to get out.
The conventional starting point for dealing with money troubles is the monthly budget - get a useful form from the CAB.
http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/index/life/debt/debt_fact_sheet_index.htm
This will ensure you really know where your money is going, and without this knowledge you won't be able to take realistic steps to change things.
Once you've done this, the important issue is motivation. The problem is that you have to stop spending money, but you've got strong behaviour patterns that are hard to change. And you'll probably rebel against the need not to spend. How do you change this?
My unconventional answer is to give money away.
Start to think like a poor person. A rich person is envious and however rich they are is always thinking about the guy next door who has more: bigger house, car, bank account etc. The richer they are the worse it gets: the billionaire must get the next billion to catch up with the REALLY rich guy he meets at the club who owns a £100 million yacht. You and I just compare ourselves with the Joneses and wish for a fancy new conservatory or a Range Rover, but it's the same rich person envy at work.
A poor person thinks the opposite way round. Across the whole world, this is how a poor person thinks: I may be really badly off but thank God I'm not as badly off as that poor guy across the road. And however poor a poor person is, they'll usually share the little they have with someone who's worse off than they are.
Think poor, compare yourself with people who really are badly off, and you can start to feel grateful for what you've got. You didn't make yourself or earn what you are or your partner or children. Most of the things in your life you really value were and are gifts.
Whether or not you do feel grateful for what you've got, resolve to give away part of what you save by your budgeting efforts. Choose one or two charities that help really poor people. Commit to paying them a fraction of what you save by cutting your expenditure.
What's the point? It's not only me. What you do has to mean something to others as well for it to really mean anything to you.
Changing the mood musicUnderlying your moods are deeply held convictions about yourself and the world, how it all is. Like these:
It's simply luck: some people are just lucky with money. It's inevitable: the rich and powerful hold onto what they've got and us small people don't stand a chance. It's up to you: anyone can become wealthy if they try. It's your genes: you're bound by your predispositions. It's how you were taught by your parents: you live by the values you learned from them. It's random: any grain of sand can end up on top of today's sandcastle. It's immoral: you can only get rich at the expense of others.
Deep down we all have a combination of these and other views of how it is and they shape our money behaviour. But they are just views, and reality is bigger than all of them.
Learn to check out your own mood music and maybe you'll find the composer. Then you can ask for different tunes.
