Are you sick and tired of hearing the same old conventional financial advice? We feel you. We're fed up with those same old truisms that fall flat when you get into the unique opportunities and challenges of specific situations. This show is all about bringing you historic wisdom around wealth-building with practical insights on how to apply it to your journey. When conventional financial thinking doesn't get you where you want to go, you need wealth wisdom. Let's master wealth-building together.
(00:03): So you're finally at a good place. Your debt is going down. You have a stable income. You're even starting to build some extra funds. Congratulations. You should feel like financial worries are a thing of the past. Yet you find yourself wonder when something will go wrong. Anxiety about money is still there. How might you overcome it for good. So you can get on with building your wealth. I'm Brandon and welcome to the wealth wisdom financial podcast, episode 1 0 4, overcoming your financial worry. When building wealth, hey, I'm Amanda worrying about money. Isn't just for people who lost their job or saw their retirement portfolio, take a dip, worry can look like feeling behind and wondering if you'll ever be able to catch up. Worry could be that thought that there could be something you're missing or haven't thought of of yet the most common reaction to worry is avoidance. Distract yourself with something else, delay making a decision or let someone else decide for you yet. Avoidance can cause much more worry in the future. It's like delaying a root canal today. We wanna share some wealth wisdom that will go way beyond just thinking positive and using relaxation techniques to help combat your worry.
(01:24): Are you sick and tired of hearing the same old conventional financial advice? We feel you we're fed up with the same old truisms that fall flat. When you get into the unique opportunities and challenges of your own specific situations. This show is all about bringing you historic wisdom around building wealth, with practical insights on how to apply it for your journey. When conventional financial thinking, doesn't get you to where you wanna go. You need wealth wisdom. Let's master wealth building together. Chronic worrying can be a major symptom of generalized anger, anxiety disorder. Be sure to seek out medical to seek a medical expert for more information. If you are a chronic worrier in general today, we hope to share some encouragement for those who find themselves worrying more than they'd like to about money in particular. And especially if they feel any sort of guilt, they should actually be happy with what they have. The common worries we hear at this kind of stage in the financial journey are questions like, am I doing it right? Or can't could I be missing something?
(02:39): First of all, we want to acknowledge something very important. Anxiety is normal. Seriously. Anxiety is normal. There are real issues that we experience now or could experience in the future, right? Anxiety is a natural response to anticipated future problems. Worry can actually be a positive if it helps you to take precautions like wearing a seatbelt, keeping an emergency fund and buying insurance worry can also help you avoid harmful activities like driving too fast, buying from a snake oil salesman or putting a hundred percent of your retirement funds into cryptocurrency. If you feel absolutely no financial worry or anxiety, that might actually be a problem. Perhaps we'll come back to that in a future episode, We've all had our fair share of worries in the past, especially if we're trying to get to a stable place, the worries of if we'll have enough to pay the bills on time or the anxiety that another overdraft fee you know, is there that might haunt many of our paths, including Brandon and I like we've been there. That's true for us too. And as people who have also started businesses, the worries of if it'll make enough money, each month are difficult to overcome. We found those types of worries can actually drive us to get better, to hustle a little bit more, to get those types of worries behind us once and for all. But then once we've done that, we found that we tend to think that we're gonna be worry free, but now there's a whole set of new worries to it that start to crowd our, our minds and our thinking.
(04:24): Now we haven't found much wisdom out there about dealing with that set of worries that come when you're starting to build wealth. So that's why we wanted to make this episode about it. If you're at the stage where you want to overcome worry and kind of break the paycheck to paycheck cycle and overdraft fees, that kind of stage of, of building wealth, we recommend checking out one of our most popular episodes, paycheck to paycheck, grandma strategy, to break the cycle that we aired back in January of 2020, we'll put a link into the show notes. So you don't have to scroll back that far for that episode For now. Let's talk about when worry becomes a problem on the road to building wealth, worry becomes a problem on your road to building wealth. When it keeps you from doing something that's good for you. For example, we've seen people keep all of their retirement funds in a cash account or a CD because worried about making a wrong decision when it comes to the other choices that they may have,
(05:28): We see lots of poor results of too min, too much financial worry. Many of them fall into three basic categories. And yes, because I'm this kind of person, these three basic categories, I'll start with the letters. First of course, is distraction. Worry often causes people to distract themselves with other things, you know, binge watching on Netflix or something because they're worried about making a wrong decision. So they do something else. They fill their calendars. So they can say I'm too busy to meet with the financial planner or financial professional. So again, they're too busy watching Netflix or something. This becomes a tremendous problem. When the distractions causes overspending or negative behaviors, you know, they, they are distracted. And so they spend more and blah, blah, blah, all the cycle continues or they spend more in order to distract themselves. Yep. So that's too much financial worry causes people to avoid making a decision by distracting themselves. The second is delay too much. Financial worry, often causes people to delay. They'll go through the motions of learning more about their options or setting up a strategy, but then they delay going through with it because they're worried about making a wrong decision. The analogy I wanna use here is people who delay getting married because they're worried they're making a wrong decision and kind of a, a little too much worry. I think back to the time in my life when I was the most anxious and it was the week before our wedding, I actually carried around a bottle of Atlanta because my tummy was so topsy turvy, we were getting, we had like set the date booked to the venue, everything. And yet I was still super worried. Right? I'm so thankful someone told me that I was never gonna be a hundred percent sure. But if I was 80% sure, then I was making the right decision. I relied way less on the anti TAs after that reassuring conversation. And now we've been happily married for over 15 years.
(07:36): I'm so glad that you did that too. The 80% thing. Amazing. The reason I share this story is because that's, when I learned a profoundly useful bit of wisdom, and I'm really excited to share it with you today. It's this having an ally is the best anxiety, reducing heartburn medication for someone's financial life, a money ally as like Toms or Alka Selzer for your wallet, time and time again, when I'm anxious, having a friend in my corner reduces my anxiety. Allies are supposed to be listening in empathetic ears with mouths to share a bit of bits of wisdom and encouragement along the way. Plus now I use that 80% rule of thumb for a lot of decisions. If I can get to 80% sure I'm making the right decision, then I move forward and I stop delaying. Now, the third way we see worrying become a problem for wealth building is when it causes people to delegate the decision too much worry leads some to just hand off their financial futures to someone else and let them take care of It. Now, this is different than having an ally allies empower you to be your best self handing over your money to someone else to manage and make decisions for you is actually disempowering.
(08:54): Now we believe people should have a more active role in securing their financial futures. It doesn't mean you have to learn all the things about the stock market, though. It does mean you have to have an ally who you talk with more than once a year or once every five years or something like actually have a relationship to put them. So perhaps this is a great way to tell if you're worrying too much, ask yourself is worrying, causing me to distract delay or delegate beyond usual. This is your diagnostic tool. This question is worrying, causing me to distract delay or delegate beyond usual. And if you answer yes to that question, you've diagnosed the problem. You're worrying too much. You're worrying to the point that it's causing harm rather than moving you toward helpful directions. And that's when you're ready for what's next. Let's talk about some wisdom for overcoming anxiety in a way that will help you move towards a, a better financial future. We found a huge source of power to overcome worry from our faith. At least 32 studies have shown that spiritual practices reduce anxiety for us. There's one sentence in particular. And it's written to a young man who seemed to have anxiety problems. He had some stomach problems that were solved with wine, not just Milan, you know, they used wine back in the day, Amanda, a friend of his asked some people hosting him to put him to ease the author of a letter written to this young man reminds him, God, didn't give him a spirit of anxiety, but a spirit of power of love and of self discipline. It's actually those three things that we find helpful to O overcoming financial worry, that spirit of power of love and of self discipline.
(10:56): Yeah. And these three things do kind of connect to that spiritual side of us. They're not gonna seem very like finance oriented, but stick with us here. See how these hit you in terms of taking a more spiritual lens toward overcoming worry. As you build wealth might help you see it in a different light. So, so the first one is power for me. This means realizing I have more power than I thought and seeking out empowering relationships that you know, God has given me the ability and the wisdom and the knowledge to make good decisions. It's kind of like in Guatemala, children get these dolls and they are told, tell your worries to the dolls and to the worry doll place the doll under your pillow at night. And by morning, the dolls will gift you wisdom and knowledge to eliminate your worries. Now, who knows if there's something happening in the spiritual realm that actually gives these children more wisdom and knowledge as they sleep, but it's giving them the power to realize. When I look at that from an outsider, it's like they have the wisdom and knowledge on their own. And these worry dolls are just a way to show them that they have it themselves, right? If they just wait a little bit, their mind will keep thinking and they'll, they'll come up a with the solution for, for whatever is worrying them. Perhaps we need to think in similar ways, we might need to believe in ourselves or maybe in a higher power that we have the wisdom already, or it's on its way to us. Now, financially, we might not need financial worry dolls. And, you know, we tell our worries to them put 'em under our pillows, but how might having a financial professional who acts like a worry doll help us, we would, might tell them our worries. And they might give us wisdom and knowledge to eliminate those worries. And they empower us to do what's best for us. How might having that kind of relationship change your financial story and help you worry less.
(12:53): That's pretty powerful. Amanda. The second one is love making decisions based on love above anything else. Now here's an interesting thing. Greed and fear is often what drives the stock market. I mean, literally there's a graph that shows where we're at on either the greed side or the, your side in some sense, our entire economy is driven by greed sometimes for the better. And sometimes for the worse, how might your worry? Less? How might you worry less? If you ask yourself, is this decision on making based on love could be love for God. Love for yourself. Love for your family. Love for your neighbors or around people around the world. If the answer is yes, this decision is based on love. Does that relieve a light of worry for you? Perhaps you can take Solas in the idea that when you base your decision on love, you making more money will only further that love rather than drive it away from you. How often do people say something like I'm gonna work really hard now, so I'm successful. And then I can spend the time with my loved ones yet when they reach the quote unquote success, they end up all alone because they were not expressing their love along.
(14:20): Maybe we should create t-shirts that say, love, triumphs, worry or something like that. I think that's really powerful power love. And now we get to the third one itself, discipline. This is a hard one, cuz we automatically go to the things we should do, blah, blah, blah. But I, when I think of self discipline, I think about finding our unique internal motivations to live and do money intentionally rather than just following what other people say we should do. One of my favorite examples recently of this is a young friend of mine was telling me how she wishes her parents would enjoy their wealth. Now that they actually have some they're empty nesters. They are in some of their highest earning years yet they still live almost the same as they did when their house was full of kids. And they were saving for helping pay for college. They're super like disciplined, right? They, they are super responsible. What, however you wanna call it. And she thought they should be traveling more or driving nicer cars or you know, some in some way enjoying their wealth. And I asked her, well, do they seem happy with how they're currently living and what they're currently doing? And she thought for a second and she said, yeah, they do. And I was, and I said something along the lines of, well then do they need to do all those things? Do they need to spend their wealth? If they're happy with how they're currently, you know operating, it's a very common myth that having more money or spending more money will bring you happiness. What if the most powerful tool you have against worry is self discipline?
(15:58): Here's the thing when I worry, it often leads to no sleep, right? Have you guys ever experienced that? You know, you're worrying and then you have no sleep. Then it's harder to get out of bed and find the motivation to exercise. And that gets crazy then because I didn't exercise, I think might as well have that donut and the cycle continues and builds and grows. On the flip side. When I found the internal motivation to exercise regularly, I slept better. I felt better and I worried less. My youth find something similar when you apply that to money, might finding the internal motivation to add some self discipline or some additional self discipline to your financial life. Decrease your worry is that possible. We'll wrap up today by sharing one final encouragement to our self-employed and business owner, friends many start their own businesses or side hustles because they are worried about only having one income from a W2. They worry they could get laid off and they have no backup plan. That's the kind of worry that's actually helpful in the same way that wearing a seatbelt is helpful. Your worry though might become destructive. If you let it distract you from the actions you need to take to grow your business, if you let it defer making decisions that would help you become more profitable, or if you delegate important functions within your business to people who are not competent or trained to handle them, distract, defer, and delegate are counteracted by owning your power, acting in love and growing in self discipline within your business as well. A lot of what we talk about on this podcast applies to businesses along with, you know, personal. And we try to make sure we're always emphasizing that, but we do have a whole set of tools for business owners. Brandon, please tell the folks listening about how they might find out more
(17:54): So as you are learning new information are coming up with those fresh ideas. It's difficult to decide what to carry through with. And when, so we've developed a filter to use when deciding how to move forward towards your goals and dreams, financial, and otherwise it's a free gift to you waiting@stillmethod.com. So go download it today and start connecting with your still center, right? That's a really good tool right there. The still method is one resource we have, but we have more, you can also join an amazing community of self-employed and business owners who are doing these things of defeating distraction and deferring in delegation and moving in towards love and growing in self-discipline and all that stuff. And that is@wealthwisdomdotmn.co. So if you go go to wealth, wisdom.mn.co, you will find your tribe there. So go check that out as well. And of course, be sure to subscribe to the podcast because next time we've got some powerful wisdom to share when you're ready to overcome worry, but then you find that there are too many options for the routes you might take going forward. You know, you're ready to stop distracting yourself. You're ready to stop deferring. You're ready to stop delegating and you're gonna own your power, but then you find, oh my gosh, there's too many different things I could do. The problem is that most people approach that feeling of overwhelm on their financial options backwards. And we're gonna tell you how to flip this script and approach it the right way are what we found to be the right way.
(19:34): So until next time, keep building your financial confidence and we hope you live long and profit. The topics presented in this podcast are for general information only, and not for the purpose of providing legal counseling and investment in ways on such matters. Please consult a professional who know is your specific situation.
(19:55): This is the podcast factory.com.
