Overcoming Financial Struggles

It’s a guarantee that at some point in your life you’re going to experience financial struggles in one way or another. While you can’t prevent this from happening, what you can take charge of is what you do when it does occur.

Assigning Blame Doesn’t Help You Dig Yourself Out of Trouble

When something goes wrong as it inevitably does, it’s often a habit to search for who’s to blame. Whether it’s another person, yourself or a product, assigning blame is really a way of seeking out who or what was at fault for the situation being what it is.

Whenever there’s blame to be had, it always raises questions. You want to know how the situation happened or who caused this to happen. Those are the wrong questions. The right questions are what do you need to do to move forward and is there a way to prevent the situation from happening again in the future.

If you dwell on the first part - who or what is to blame - then you end up stuck and that’s a waste of your time. Even if you figure out blame, it still doesn’t help solve the problem. The only thing that blame does is to stir up anger at others or yourself and it can lay the groundwork for discouragement.

Sometimes people tend to want to blame themselves when things go wrong and they don’t let it go. They believe that by beating themselves up and reiterating that they’ve messed up, it will somehow ensure that they do better in the future.

It won’t. All it does is tear you down. It eats away at your self-worth and confidence when you do this. You don’t want to waste time on that. Besides, what happens if you do uncover the root cause of the blame?

You’re not any closer to digging yourself out of trouble. All you’ve done is waste mental energy on something that’s too late to do anything about. When you refuse to place blame, you’re not shirking responsibility for the problem.

What you’re doing instead is choosing to not let yourself get mired down with something you can no longer change anyway. It happened. Now what you have to work on is fixing the problem and coming up with a plan on how you’re going to avoid similar trouble down the road.

To fix what went wrong, you choose a more productive route. Dismiss blame and seek problem solving solutions instead. Look at what you can do to fix the trouble that you’re in.

When you focus your energy and efforts on fixing the trouble, it helps keep you on track toward reaching your goals. When you do get the problem solved, you still don’t want to dredge up blame.

That’s thinking in the past and you always want to face forward in your thinking. Once it’s over, determine what you discovered about the problem. Look at what it took to fix it. You will have learned a way to persevere despite the roadblock in your way.

Pay attention to what it took to fix the problem so that it won’t happen again. Realize that it never matters who or what is to blame. You’re the one who’s responsible for your life regardless of what comes into it.

It doesn’t matter if someone else disrupts your journey toward your goals or if you’re the one who did. Don’t bog yourself down in playing the blame game. What does matter is that you remain determined to dig yourself out of trouble no matter how long it takes you.

Financial Independence Will Cater to Your Personal and Career Satisfaction

If you’re not financially independent, you may not be able to buy the stuff that you’d like to buy. You may not be able to replace or upgrade things like your furnishings or your vehicle if you’d like to.

Vacations can seem like a far off dream when you’re not financially independent. Some people are even at the point financially where it’s a struggle just to afford their basic needs let alone the stuff they’d like to have.

Those are some of the external ramifications of not having the money or income that you’d like to have or that you need. There’s an internal ramification to living this way and it can be far worse.

When you’re not financially independent, it does a number on your self-esteem. Your self-worth gets beaten to a pulp. You might feel like you’re a failure. You feel like you struggle and struggle and your life is just filled with effort that’s not getting you anywhere.

It’s like you’re spinning your wheels. You feel like you’re worthless. When you’re not financially independent, the amount of stress that you struggle with can be astronomical.

It can impact your ability to sleep - your ability to eat. It can also affect your ability to think clearly and be able to make decisions that can help your financial future to improve.

Not only that, but when you don’t have the money that you need to have, it affects the goals that you have for your career. You might not be able to get the formal education that you need to get a promotion.

Or you may not be able to even work in the field that you’d like to go into. If you have personal goals, not having the money you need can prevent you from purchasing the tools that you need.

Or if you want to learn something and you need to buy materials for that, a lack of money can stop you. Not being financially independent can make success look like something that you’ll never have.

When you’re faced with that, it can act as ropes that tie you to your situation. You may feel as if you’ll never break free. There is a proven psychological connection between money and your self-esteem.

Your financial independence can influence your actions. People who are financially independent have higher self-confidence than those who aren’t. They tend to take chances and accept risks.

They reach for what they want more often than people who don’t have the money to go after personal or career satisfaction. One theory behind this is that people who have the money they need feel more proactive and in charge of their lives.

They don’t have to wait to act based on the amount of their paycheck or the direction of their career. They simply decide and do. When you’re financially independent, it can help in making choices that affect your life.

It can help lead you to reaching the goals and the success that you want to strive for. When you’re in charge of your life financially, you get to determine your success rather than the other way around.

You Can’t Be Complacent About Corrective Measures for Your Finances

You can’t afford to be complacent when it comes to taking corrective measures for your finances. You might be someone who doesn’t like dealing with finances or you don’t feel like making decision.

But what you don’t realize is that by not making a decision, you really are. When your finances need corrective measures, it only gets worse without you taking the wheel. You can’t sit back and let whatever happens, happen.

Your finances don’t improve and success will elude you if you do that. You’ll also be limiting your life if you don’t take care of money matters. Taking care of your finances in turn takes care of you.

You must be aggressive and seek to improve your situation. You might have to face some uncomfortable truths. For some people that’s going to mean sitting down and looking at what’s going on with your money.

You might think that everything’s okay but then you look and realize that you’re one paycheck away from financial disaster. Financial health, like physical health is something that gets better with preventative treatment.

You can tell if you’ve been complacent about not correcting your financial health if you’re too afraid to make a change in your job or career. It’s not that you don’t want to. You just don’t know how you’ll pay the bills if you do.

Another sign is not wanting to look at all the bills you have or the debt that you have. You just pay the minimum on everything and while you make the payment, there’s not really anything left over.

You’re existing. Not living. You might be someone who buys stuff without considering the most important question you should ask yourself. Can I really afford this? Your financial situation might show that your savings account looks like a ghost town.

You have no emergency plan much less a plan for retirement. When you correct your finances, it gives you freedom. Freedom to chase the goals that you want to chase. To change careers.

To go after personal goals. Whatever you want. Be aggressive and take control to bring your financial picture up to par. Create a plan and stick with it. Pay off debt. Save money.

Say no to yourself. Stop making impulse buys. Put off the temporary pleasure you might find so that you can instead have long term success.