Is Your Money Affecting Your Relationships?: 3 Tips to Cultivate A Healthier Money Relationship

How we interact with our money can affect how we interact with others, and ourselves. So it’s important to tend to our relationship with money, in order to keep things clear in our other relationships! Today, I’m talking about three different ways that money may be affecting your relationships, and how you can begin to cultivate a healthier relationships with your money. I’ll be referencing The Soul of Money, an amazing book by Lynne Twist, throughout. Check out my book review if you’d like to learn more!

1. Dissolve the Competition

“Money has become a playing field where we measure our competence and worth as people. We worry that if we stop striving for more, we’ll… lose our advantage.” – Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money

As this quote highlights, money in our society is a high-stakes game. The competition and the need to always be getting more, buying more, earning more, and doing more can creep in and take over our lives. This can and does affect our social relationships. The phrase “keeping up with Joneses” is direct proof of how competition around money can affect how we interact with our neighbors, friends, and community members. At the same time, it’s also evidence of how we tend to measure ourselves and our efforts – against our earnings.

To cultivate a healthier relationship with money, and in turn, healthier social relationships, I suggest beginning by removing this element of competition. Work with affirmations or turn to mindset work or journal prompts to find ways to uproot this tendency. Talk openly with other people about your money. That’s a perfect segue into my next point!

2. Practice Transparency

“Our behavior around money has damaged relationships when money has been used as an instrument of control or punishment, emotional escape or manipulation, or as a replacement for love.” – Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money

Find some people who you can really trust to talk to about money. I call this process building a Money Team. In particular, it’s great to have a friend or two who you can open up to about finances.

Having a Money Buddy can give you a space to practice financial transparency, and get more comfortable bringing up money in your social relationships. This can be a great way to work on the feelings that come up around money in this arena. Eventually, you might find yourself feeling more comfortable sharing about your financial situation in general!

3. Create a Spiritual Connection to Your Money

“Your relationship with money can be a place where you bring your strengths and skills, your highest aspirations, and your deepest and most profound qualities.”  – Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money

The Soul of Money is definitely an excellent resource in this area. Lynne Twist writes about how money is like water, it’s a resource that’s meant to flow. She encourages us to recognize that money itself is not problematic, and that it is instead the interpretation of money that brings up so many issues.

Doing some personal work around our connections with money can be a great way to prevent it from interrupting our connections with ourselves and others. If you’d like some resources for this pursuit, I have a couple suggestions:

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By |2022-02-10T16:07:36-08:00February 10th, 2022|Categories: Financial Clarity, Money Mindset, Personal Savings, Personal Spending|Tags: , , , , , , |0 Comments
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My #1 System for Achieving Financial Goals

You reach your goals if you work on them regularly. Things happen one day, one week, one month at a time. So, it might come as no surprise to you that my #1 system for achieving financial goals is making regular time for financial self care. I’ve seen this work with many clients and know that in personal experience, this is what works best for me. This approach is backed by many achievement experts, like Gary Keller. In The One Thing, he suggests setting a single goal and then suggests scheduling focused time to work on it into your calendar and protecting it.

Make financial self care a habit! I frequently suggest checking in with your finances on a weekly basis, but another time interval might work well for you too. Since we’re thinking about self care, consider your weekly financial check-in a part of your overall self care routine. Just like you manage your time and your physical health with self care, your money is a resource to manage and use to your best advantage. Use your regular “money time” to work towards your financial goal. 

Here are a couple suggestions of things to do:

  • check in on your spending for the month to see where you’re at with your spending plan
  • check in with your financial goal for the month
  • talk to your money mentor or your partner
  • spend time learning about finances
  • do any finance-related admin work you need (paying off bills, sending off IOU’s, billing clients, etc.)

Most importantly, make sure this time is enjoyable so you can keep coming back to it every week. Try to limit the amount of time you spend, so that you finish off your money time by completing a task. I suggest starting with twenty or thirty minutes and slowly increasing the amount as your finances become more interesting for you to work with. Pro tip: when you end on a high note, it’s easier to keep the habit going. And don’t forget to reward yourself for sticking with this habit!

If you liked this article, you’ll probably like my free e-Book, 9 Secrets to Financial Self Care. Click here to download.

By |2022-01-28T13:23:15-08:00January 27th, 2022|Categories: Financial Clarity, Money Mindset|Tags: , , , , , , , , |0 Comments
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4 Strategies for Setting Doable Financial Goals

If you set financial goals that are way out of your reach, you’re setting yourself up for defeat and disappointment. Rather than curtail your progress with emotional roadblocks, try simplifying your financial goal-setting for this year. These four strategies can help you create goals that are meaningful, motivating, and realistically achievable.

Check in With Your Values

Check in with your values before setting goals. Your business, your finances, and your goals should enable you to have enough of the things you value in your life to feel satisfied. Basing your goals on your values will also give you a clear way to connect with your “money why” and stay motivated when you’re working towards them. 

Set One Goal

Set one goal, not a dozen. This will make it easier to manage and complete the goal. James Clear is a great thinker around goal setting, and brings up the psychological concept of goal competition. “…Your goals are competing with one another for your time and attention. Whenever you chase a new goal, you have to pull focus and energy from your other pursuits….What often looks like a problem of goal setting is actually a problem of goal selection.”

When you cull your goals down to one, you’re able to direct all your focus and effort towards this one goal. Of course, I’m speaking about the general realm of your finances. In reality you’ll of course still have a full and complex life – all the more reason to simplify things and pick one financial goal to focus on! Which brings me to the next point:

Identify Your “One Thing”

Identify the thing to do in your finances that would make everything else easier or irrelevant. This is from Gary Keller’s book, The One Thing. This book carries a similar message to what I wrote above: multi-tasking is actually holding you back from making progress on your goals. Using the question “What is the one thing, such that by doing it, everything else would become easier or irrelevant?” can help you further cull your goals and make space in your finances to get focused. 

Turn Your Goal Into a System

How will you stay on track with your goal? When setting your financial goal, consider how you’ll turn it into action items, and how you’ll complete those action items. Will you set up a time to make progress each week? Will you find a money buddy to work in tandem with? Will you create a special routine for yourself around checking in with your finances daily? 

Carving out regular time to devote effort and attention to your goal is one fo the best ways to actually achieve it. So when setting a goal, keep in mind how likely you are to be able to do this, and how you’ll set up a system for success. If you’d like to work on a financial goal with my guidance, set up a free Financial Self Care Consultation.

☮

Angela

By |2022-01-19T14:45:56-08:00January 19th, 2022|Categories: Financial Clarity, Money Mindset|Tags: , , , , , |0 Comments
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The Key to Doing Money Well? It’s Your Values

It’s the New Year, and goals are on everyone’s mind. You might be thinking about a few potential financial goals. Perhaps you want to save more, pay down some debt, or spend less. All of these are honorable pursuits, but we need to make sure your goals get started off on the right foot. How do we do that? By getting clear on what you value in life.

Your values hold the key to setting meaningful financial goals and designing relevant money systems. In this blog post, I go over a couple different strategies for uncovering them.

Finding Enough

What exactly does “enough” mean in a financial context? Here’s the way I like to define it: it’s that point where you’re not over-spending, over-saving, or over-working. I love this quote from Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, the authors of Your Money or Your Life:

“Enough for our survival. Enough comforts. And even enough little “luxuries.” We have everything we need; there’s nothing extra to weigh us down, distract or distress us, nothing we’ve bought on time, have never used and are slaving to pay off. Enough is a fearless place. A trusting place. An honest and self-observant place. It’s appreciating and fully enjoying what money brings into your life and yet never purchasing anything that isn’t needed or wanted.”

Finding this point relies on adopting a mindset of sufficiency, as Lynne Twist write about in The Soul of Money. It means you need to assess what your needs and wants are, and identify those comforts and little luxuries.

Needs Vs. Wants

I’ve written about needs vs. wants before in terms of how defining both can be helpful for spending. You can read that article here. In this post, I want to share an exercise straight from Karen McCall, my mentor and author of Financial Recovery.

Karen advises to make a needs and wants list, by simply dividing a piece of paper in half and beginning to sort things onto either side of the page. “Let yourself envision items or experiences that seem to be missing from your life. These can be small things like new walking shoes or bigger experiences like sharing a trip to Hawaii with a friend or loved one.” She counsels that we don’t need to get too hung up on categorizing things perfectly, but should instead plan on coming back to the list to reflect and revise. Doing this process repeatedly brings a new level of clarity to our values and how we want to allocate our resources.

Leaving Room to Dream

In her wonderful book, 55, Underemployed, and Faking Normal, Elizabeth White asks us to consider what it would be like to “live a life not defined by things.” She suggests focusing on meeting our needs and wants creatively and inexpensively, an approach also suggested by Karen McCall. Within this framework, there is freedom to dream about what you want in your life and how to get it. Karen McCall talks about a similar phenomenon when she writes,

“As you develop an ability to meet your most essential needs, the noise and distraction created by a troubled relationship with money are quieted. Without the deafening noise of worry, obsession, fear, and deprivation, you’re able to hear and value that quiet voice inside that utters your deepest desires.”

As you find ways to bring the things you value most into your life, you may start to uncover more about yourself and your wishes. This is perfectly ok and I recommend leaving space for yourself to keep dreaming as you get in touch with your values.

I also love doing this work with clients! If you’d like to work with a guide through this process, schedule a free Financial Self Care Consultation to see if financial coaching is right for you.

☮

Angela

Photo by Eye for Ebony

By |2022-01-13T11:13:17-08:00January 13th, 2022|Categories: Financial Clarity|Tags: , , , , , , , , |0 Comments
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Celebrate Good Times: Enjoy Your Financial Wins!

My number one tip for financial self care is celebration. Specifically, celebrating your financial wins. A financial win is any instance where you get a little bit closer to a goal you’ve set for yourself. So even if it’s just saving an extra $5, resisting the urge to spend on something small, paying down your debt just a bit, or making the first appointment with a bookkeeper or coach, these are big steps, and they deserve to be celebrated.

In my series on how to do a mid-year business review, I wrote this passage on celebrating your financial wins:

…[T]ake stock again of all you’ve done this year, including this review process. Chances are, you will find you’ve done quite a bit of work towards your goals, no matter how close you might be to completing them! Take some time to celebrate all the work you’ve done. Treat yourself to an afternoon off, a fun or inspiring event, or whatever you’d like to do to celebrate your achievements so far! Being a self-starting solopreneur is hard work. If you’ve done the work, you deserve to cheer yourself on once in a while.

I whole-heartedly believe this is true, and especially with the challenges this year has faced us with, we definitely need a moment to look at all our accomplishments and congratulate ourselves. Doing this is important to sustaining our financial self care routine, because it encourages to keep moving forward on our goals.

I invite you to find whatever feels like it would be the most meaningful way to celebrate these things. It might be sharing them with other people, like a money buddy or a mentor. It could be rewarding yourself with a purchase or some time off. If you use the Profit First system, it’s time for your quarterly profit distribution! Think about what you’d like to use it for. If you need some help thinking about the most meaningful way to celebrate, check out The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist.

Marking Time and Progress

Over the years, running your business may often feel like a blur. In order to get the fulfillment and satisfaction you want from it, it’s important to take time to mark time and progress. Notice how long you’ve been running your business. Make a practice of keeping track how you’ve grown and progressed as a business owner. Celebrating your financial wins is one excellent way to keep up with that practice.

Marking time and progress also helps you create a sense of momentum and purpose. This helps you keep coming back to your financial goals. When you notice how your actions are bringing you closer to certain achievements, it gets easier to show up every day and do the work you need to do.

So, celebrate yourself today! If you’d like more thoughts on celebrating your financial wins and other topics in the realm of financial self care, download my free e-Book, 9 Secrets to Financial Self Care. 

☮

Angela

By |2021-12-31T15:08:24-08:00December 13th, 2021|Categories: Financial Clarity, Money Mindset|Tags: , , , , , |0 Comments
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Your Year in Money: How & Why to Reflect on Your Year

Reflecting on your year as it comes to a close is an important and time-honored activity. When you’re reminiscing and re-evaluating, don’t forget to think about your money, too! Considering how this year went for you financially is an important part of the process. Here’s the why and how of it:

Why Reflect?

Reflecting on your financial journey throughout 2021 can yield several important results. First, it can give you a chance to simply notice what’s changed, and how. The last two years have been economically tumultuous for most of us. Consider where your finances were at in the beginning of the year, as opposed to where they are now.

Aside from noting change over time, this can also be a chance for you to learn from your past money moves. Perhaps this year you tried some new strategies or made a big purchase. Reflecting on how different events in your financial life this past year have worked out can give you insights into what to do next, and what you’d rather not do again.

Finally, I personally believe that just giving your money the gift of your attention is a positive thing by itself. Simply making it a habit to check in with your money and what it’s doing right now can be enough to start you off.

Prompts for Reflection

To spur your reflective time, I have a couple different questions you can try asking yourself. These prompts are about your values and your goals, rather than the nitty-gritty details. If you’re more interested in that, scroll down to the review section. You might like to try answering these questions either as journal prompts, or use them as discussion questions with a money buddy:

  • How has my financial situation changed over the course of this year? Where am I now compared to December 2020?
  • Do I feel fulfilled by how I used my money this year? Why/why not?
  • How do I feel about they way I showed up with my money this year?
  • What are my financial lessons this year? What did I do with my money that worked so well, I’m going to do it again next year? What would I like to improve on?

Do a Review

If you want a reflective process that gets further into the numbers and details, I have two recommendations for you. First, of course, I highly recommend doing a year-end review with a bookkeeper if it’s your business finances you’re reflecting on. Second, I encourage you to check out my article on doing a business check-in. You can adapt this process to fit to your personal finances too, if you’d prefer that.

If you enjoyed doing this reflective process, you’d probably like my free e-Book, 9 Secrets to Financial Self Care, which contains a lot of ideas for up-leveling your financial life in ways that are simple and sustainable. Download your copy here.

☮

Angela

By |2021-12-13T14:29:34-08:00December 13th, 2021|Categories: Financial Clarity, Money Mindset|Tags: , , , , , |0 Comments
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Why You Need a Year End Bookkeeping Review

As the year wraps up, I want to encourage all solopreneurs to engage in a little financial self-care, by reviewing your 2021 books! There are several reasons to review your financial records at this time of year. They  can benefit from the eye of an expert. If you don’t already have a bookkeeper and would like some oversight, schedule a review with someone! The financial insight will go a long way for your business.

Here are my top two reasons for reviewing your books now.

Tax Prep

First of all, straightening out your 2021 books to prep for tax season simply makes sense. Hiring an expert to help you do this can ensure that your books are accurate. That extra bit of readiness will feel so good come tax season, I promise! It will save you some stress and last minute rushing come tax time. Think of it as a holiday gift to yourself!

Where Did You Make Your Money?

My second reason for scheduling a bookkeeping review with a professional is so that someone with a trained eye can go over your books and help you discern where, when, and from what you made the most money. This kind of insight is invaluable to any small business, especially if your goal is growth. Your financial records hold this info. Work with someone willing to help you find it! For more about finding and working with a bookkeeper, check out my post “How to Get the Most Value From Your Bookkeeper”. The insights you gain from a good bookkeeping review could help shape your plan for your business in 2022 – all the more reason to review them now.

Going over your books with a professional will save you a lot of stress and provide you with knowledge needed to run a successful business. Please consider scheduling a year-end review – you’ll thank yourself later! I offer bookkeeping services along with strategic advising. If you’re looking for someone to work with, don’t hesitate to schedule a curiosity call with me.

Here’s to tying up your financial loose ends!

☮

Angela

By |2021-12-07T13:50:25-08:00December 7th, 2021|Categories: Bookkeeping Business, Financial Clarity, Small Business, solopreneurs|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |0 Comments
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The Most Important Question a Business Owner Can Ask Themselves

It’s easy to get caught up in the “How?” and the “When?” questions of running a business. However, the most important question a business owner can ask themselves is “Why?” Specifically, “Why am I running this business?” Recently, I shared on social media that I’ve been doing some of my own personal reflecting on my why. I’m about four years into running this business, and though I’m in a good flow, sometimes even the best things start to feel a bit stale. Reflecting on my why helped me counteract this and bring me back to a place of feeling fulfilled in my business.

My Why

One thing that’s always motivated my passion for helping people find peace with their money, is my past experiences with my family. When I was growing up, both my parents experienced a lot of financial stress. This issue affected our whole family, especially my mom, very deeply. As an adult, I knew that I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps. Beyond that, I also wanted to make it possible for other people to avoid that level of money anxiety.

At Peace With Money was born out of a desire to help business owners create money systems that were restorative to them, rather than demanding machines that set the pace for the rest of their lives. Continuing to reconnect with this purpose of my business keeps me feeling fulfilled in my work.

Letting Your Why Inform Your Offerings

As business owners, we need to make a lot of decisions. Referring back to our why when we need to come up with offerings or think about who we want to work with can be immensely helpful. I encourage you to spend some time thinking about your why and your current offerings, and how they’re related. Is your why reflected in what you offer? Do you feel fulfilled by offering those products or services?

Business Why vs. Money Why

In the past, I’ve written about discovering your Money Why. This is a bit different than the why I’m talking about today, which we can call your Business Why. Your Money Why is a purpose and a plan for the income you make; your Business Why is more about the purpose and meaning you derive from running your business. It’s about considering what you want to see in the world, and how you want to make a difference. Both are very important to consider! If you’d like to learn about establishing a Money Why, read more here. I also recommend checking out my free e-Book, 3 Essential First Steps to Starting a Business. This one has a whole section on getting clear on your why that you might find helpful.

☮

Angela

By |2021-11-12T10:09:24-08:00November 12th, 2021|Categories: Financial Clarity, Money Mindset, Small Business, solopreneurs|Tags: , , , , |0 Comments
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Why Financial Education is One of the Best Investments

When we evaluate whether an investment is worth making, one of the most important considerations is what type of return it offers. Financial education boasts an excellent return. This is true in the context of your business and your personal finances. Below, I go on to list the top three benefits of investing in financial education of any kind!

Increasing Your Longterm Wealth

When we hear the phrase “return on investment”, this is the first thing most of us probably think of. Financial education does indeed have a great financial return, especially in the longterm. No matter what type of financial education you pursue, if you implement what you learn, you will increase your longterm wealth. The knowledge you apply to your financial life will change and improve how you handle money. You may find yourself more capable of making decisions around saving, spending, and investing. Over time this can have compounding positive effects.

This is true both in the case of business and personal finances, by the way! Even just the way that financial education can make you more aware of your money tends to have positive effects on both areas. When you pay more attention to your money, it’s more likely to flourish.

Acquiring Relevant Skills

The skills you learn when you invest in financial education will always be relevant to your life. As far as I know, most of us need to manage our money throughout the course of our lives. If you are a business owner, the money skills you acquire will be helpful not only to your business, but may also be helpful to your business peers and any people you want to hire or mentor in the future. Money skills really do keep on giving!

A Sense of Peace with Money

In my opinion, this one may be the best of all the benefits. The peace of mind and clarity that come along with getting the financial skills you need to manage your money well are absolutely amazing. I’ve witnessed many clients experience a great reduction in their stress levels after a few sessions together. Money is one of the leading causes of stress in the U.S. Especially for those managing debt, gaining the financial skills to recover and surmount it can be deeply emotionally healing.

Where Can I Get Financial Education?

In this article, the term “financial education” refers to any resource that helps you better understand your finances. Whether this is a podcast, a YouTube channel, a workshop or class series, or working with a coach or bookkeeper, anything you find helpful in this arena counts!

If you’d like some ideas about finding financial education resources that meet your personal needs, I have a couple articles on finding the best financial education resources for you. This article discusses why it’s important to find resources that cater to your personal vision of what wealth and success look like, while this article breaks down a couple red and green flags when it comes to evaluating a financial education resource. You can also take a look at some of my favorite financial education resources.

If you want to take a look at more of my content for some financial education resources, check out my library of free e-books (scroll down on the page) and my episodes of Financial Self Care Friday! You can also check out my services and book a free Financial Self Care Consultation!

☮

Angela

Image: Keren Levand

By |2021-07-26T10:36:43-07:00July 26th, 2021|Categories: Financial Clarity, Money Mindset|Tags: , , , , , |0 Comments
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When Is the Right Time to Invest In Your Dreams?

Whether you’re wanting to quit your day job and go full time in your business, invest in some equipment to level up your production, or get a higher level of education in your field, all of us face choices about when to invest in our dreams. Let’s talk about how to make these decisions from a financial perspective.

Consider Your Timing

First, establish a timeline for yourself on making this investment. By when would you like to start your training, hire an employee, etc? Now, think realistically about other events and expenses that may come up around that time. For example, making a large equipment purchase around the holiday season may prove to be financially stressful. By analyzing your timeline and any upcoming expenses, you can plan to have the funds and energy on hand to take this new leap.

Establish a Savings Cushion

Especially because these decisions are typically financially loaded, it’s important to already have, or begin to cultivate, a multi-layered savings cushion. Ideally, you have a savings cushion to cover periodic expenses, and another to cover income-loss emergencies, typically an amount to cover 3-12 months of your expenses saved up. You can read more about establishing a savings cushion in my article “How to Plan for Surprise Expenses“. Take a look at these ideas and then make a plan to establish a savings cushion before taking your big step.

Tune Up Your Money System

This is a good idea whenever you’re making any financial decision. Take a look at your income and expenses and see how things are going with your savings. Making a regular habit of doing this is immensely helpful and can simplify financial decisions like this one. My e-Book 9 Secrets to Financial Self Care has a lot of great insights on how to establish a habit of checking in with your money.

If you have yet to set up a money system, you might like to check out my articles on money-mapping. “The 4 Components of a Restorative Money System” is a great place to start.

I hope these suggestions are helpful and that your decisions making process is a peaceful one!

☮

Angela

By |2021-07-08T11:08:48-07:00July 8th, 2021|Categories: Financial Clarity, Small Business, solopreneurs|Tags: , , , , , , |0 Comments
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