Why I'm Here

I was still in college and working at a retail shop when I learned my first big financial lesson. After pulling into the parking lot in her high end SUV, a woman came up to the counter to purchase a name brand name jacket for her daughter. After her first couple of credit cards were declined she pulled out a pocket page, the kind used for baseball cards, and had me try card after card until one of them finally allowed her purchase. I began to see this scenario more and more and eventually realized that it wasn't just college students like me who were living paycheck to paycheck, it was most people! And these were the glory days. The mid 2000's when just about anyone could find a decent job.

I remember another occasion in 2004 when it really hit me. My husband and I were considering purchasing our first home and had been pre-approved for far more than we knew we could afford. We had just bought a brand new SUV and our mailbox was stuffed with zero percent credit card offers. I remember saying, "All of this money. It's just numbers on a screen. What if something happens and people can't pay it back? They can take away our car, but they can't repossess our college educations or the groceries we put on our credit card." Even then, before having any experience in finance I knew something was wrong. 

It's easy to point the blame of the financial crises on the politicians and the banks, but the truth is we all participated in that downward spiral. Now, I'm not going to get into a big economics lesson about the financial crisis. What we need to understand is that the financial crises, both in a spiritual and practical sense, was simply a reflection of our society and our own behavior. I know, it's hard to hear, but if we really want to move forward in our lives financially, we have to stop blaming "the man" and begin to take control of our financial health. To do that we first need to look at the root causes of how our finances get out of control in the first place.

There are a lot of great books out there that can teach you how to budget, avoid debt and invest. That's not what I'm here to do. While I will offer some practical tips from time to time the main goal of this blog is to examine why we manage money how we do, as well as all of the thoughts and emotions behind it. By becoming more aware of our habits and patterns we can begin to better understand our relationship with money.

Our relationship with money is a lot like our relationship with food. Our attitudes and behaviors toward it are going to be shaped over our lifetime by our parents, our peers and our culture. By the time we get to an age when we're ready to manage it on our own, most of us have an idea of how much money we would like to earn and the type of lifestyle we expect to have. Unfortunately, some of those influencing factors can derail our focus before we even realize what's happening.

That being said this isn't going to just be a financial blog. Our behavior with money doesn't exist in a vacuum. Like many aspects of lives, our finances are part of a much larger picture and exist merely as reflection of what is going on in our lives. We need to look holistically to really understand such symptomatic issues.

Be Well!

- Nicole