How I'm Taming My Money Anxiety
Financial literacy wasn’t as prevalent in my teens and early twenties as it is now. Whether I’m swiping through TikTok or scrolling on Medium, I’ll happen upon more than one writer or creator talking about financial freedom, generational wealth, budgeting, or getting paid what you’re worth. It’s amazing, but for someone who struggles with money anxiety (ehem) it can feel like a mountain you’ll never be able to climb.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to take baby steps with my finances and start looking at the parts that gave me the most anxiety. Now that we’re at the halfway mark of the year, I’m doing an audit of what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what I want the second half of my year to look like.
For those who thrive off definitions, “money anxiety” can simply be defined as anything that has to do with your money that makes you anxious, brings up fears, brings up old thoughts of bad moments, or gives you fear of what can happen next. It can be as “small” as looking at your bank account on a random day or as “big” as learning about the crypto market or how retirement works. Our relationship with money, like most things in our life, have roots in our childhood and family traditions. For instance, I grew up in a family that lived month to month and never had the luxury of planning ahead, which has been hard to shake even though that’s not my financial situation. I also deal with a lot of guilt associated with how much more I make than my mom ever did or my family has ever had. When I started unpacking a lot of these blocks, I started noticing that my personal fears around looking at my money is that I struggled to feel worthy to have as much as I did and whenever I spent it on anything, it felt like I would never make more.
UNDERSTAND YOUR CURRENT RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY
The first action I took back in January, and again this month, was to look at all my income, my debts, and my balances as they stood. I jotted down what I thought about money, as a general concept, and some big facts about how I’d grown up around it. I tried to answer questions like:
Where do I spend my money currently?
How much debt do I have?
When do I get anxious when pulling out my debit card?
What did my family tell me (directly or indirectly) about money?
What scares me about managing it myself now?
I did this activity over a week and paced myself. In an effort to start building a happier relationship with my finances, I would stop asking the questions whenever the anxiety would pop up. I didn’t want to keep associating more anxiety with sitting down with my money.
consider who you are and what kind of budget makes sense for you
Yes, there are styles. Over the years I’ve tried multiple different budgeting techniques. I used Mint and never stuck to it. I used spreadsheets, but would get overwhelmed after a while and fall off. When trying to decide what I was going to use this year, I tried to figure out why those other budgeting systems never worked for me — turns out it was a style thing. The Financial Diet has a great breakdown of the top 4 budgeting styles and which may work best for you.
Personally, spreadsheets didn’t work for me because they required too much work to create on my end. I was already struggling with inputting information, working to make it functional (and pretty) was beyond what I had bandwidth for. Mint works great for some people (they actually authored that TFD article), but for me, their interface was just a bit too overwhelming. I needed something simple, zero-based, and visually uncluttered. This is how I landed on You Need A Budget.
COURSE CORRECT AS YOU LEARN MORE ABOUT YOURSELF
With money, like in life, you learn as you grow. YNAB (You Need A Budget) has a bit of a learning curve. But my top tips for anyone who is starting out is:
Don’t be afraid to brain dump in your first budget attempt — I mean, add everything. I used the first 6 months with that budget as a learning experience. If I actually never spent in a category that I thought was relevant in January, that’s okay. I learned which categories to combine, which to split up, and most importantly, how much money was left to save.
Use their “Fresh Start” tool — this was a huge discovery for me in May. I realized that I could essentially “archive” and then “copy and paste” the budget I had been using previously into a Fresh Start, clean slate new budget. The reason I did this is because since I had learned more about how to use the interface I had a better understanding of what a budget actually needed to look like for me in order to meet my goals.
Using YNAB has taught me that I’m an under-spender, an anxious spender, and previously unsure about where my money was actually going. It’s helped give me a clear compass to point to any time I want to say, “I don’t have money for that,” which has helped me spend my money more confidently. It’s also improved my ability to save because now I can clearly see how much more I have to save than I previously thought.
ALLOW YOUR MONEY GOALS TO EVOLVE
I think one of the biggest lessons I’m learning as I delve into money anxiety this year is that control isn’t what I’m after, it’s confidence. I want to feel more confident in my relationship with money so that I don’t get anxiety when I check my bank account or feel reckless with my spending. Now, as I look at the second half of the year, my goals revolve around saving and investing. I’m slated to pay off my credit cards this summer and after that I want my money to start working more for me.
Talking about money with others can be scary, but I think it helps us talk to ourselves about it too. Navigating money anxiety is as essential for our mental health as any other form of self-care. It’s okay to take your time, understand yourself better, and seek support where you need it.