Finance for the People: Getting a Grip on Your Finances

There is a very simple tool you can use every day that will allow you to dampen your feelings of scarcity and amplify your feelings of abundance.

principles in life, but this is definitely one of them: practicing gratitude will make you aware of all the ways in which life is abundant. The antidote to scarcity is gratitude.

Look out for the signs: You save less than 5 percent of your income Your credit card balances aren’t going down You credit score is below 600 You have no emergency fund You’ve never made a budget You’ve paid an overdraft fee

so you can eliminate unnecessary decisions. When you eliminate these unnecessary decisions, you reduce the potential for making a crappy decision.

motion is all the things you can do without really taking action on something.

Jung wrote, “Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. . . . But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”

Of course, I look at money through the lens of economics, but I also look at money through the stories we tell ourselves in our personal and collective histories. I look at the role that our emotions play in making rational decisions.

There’s the Bills & Life group for essentials, the Fun & BS group for nonessentials and then the Future & Goals group, a broad category for all the various things you are saving for, including what you put into investment accounts.

It’s also incredibly practical to use processes and systems to help you reach financial milestones.