Rooting Out Financial Fears

Have you ever pulled weeds from a garden? Whether you’ve had a garden or not, you may have helped a family member or friend pull weeds from a garden. I remember growing up, I grew up in Indiana and going to my grandmother’s house to visit her, and she had a garden, she had a vegetable garden. And I would sometimes help her. And then my mom also had a garden, growing up, she had a also a vegetable garden. And I helped them both a little bit. They would claim not a lot. But I did help them some. And in helping them, in their garden, you know, we, of course, one of the tasks is pulling weeds from the garden. And they would often say, you know, you can’t just pull the weed up from the top. You can’t just break it. You have to pull the whole weed out. You got to get it by the roots. If you don’t, that weed will just come back. And maybe you, like I said, have done some gardening yourself or helped someone else. And you know that to be true as well. If you want to remove the weed from the garden, you got to get it up by the roots. Well, today I’m going to discuss getting to the root of the fear you may have about your finances. There’s lots of reasons why people have fear and anxiety about their finances. Fear and anxiety, with regards to your finances can stem from a variety of factors, including past negative experiences, financial instability, or a lack of financial literacy, or even confidence in your finances or what to even do. But just like when you’re gardening, when you’re when you’re talking about fears or anxieties related to your finances, it’s very important that you get to the root of the issue or the root of the problem, and that you remove that there. Otherwise, again, just like the weed in the garden, it can come back. So I’ll start with talking about past negative experiences. This could be growing up. It doesn’t necessarily mean you grew up. Maybe you did grow up in poverty, but maybe you just saw your parents really struggle growing up. So that negative experience could impact some of your fears now. Something else could be, maybe you saw your family member a friend, or maybe it was you, experience a job loss or suffer bankruptcy. These are all things. Or maybe just struggling with the payments, you know, making their monthly payments. And all of these different past negative experiences could impact and cause you to have some financial fear, or anxiety. Something else is financial instability. So maybe you have very high debt, now or expenses now, and you’re really struggling about just making your month to month payments. So that’s the financial instability now, maybe of a fear of losing a job, coming up. So these are kind of your current situations where you’re really worried about what if this happens. What if that happens? And then the other thing I was going to say earlier that I talked about is financial literacy or competence or confidence in, in your financial situation. So for some people, it’s really more about, they just they lack the confidence, as far as understanding what they should be doing or shouldn’t be doing or wondering if they’re doing the right thing. Some other common fears I see, you know, fear of running out of money, of course, fear of making the wrong financial decision. A fear, there’s even a fear of losing everything. What if the worst case scenario happens and I lose everything? So I think with all of these things, like I mentioned earlier, it’s really important. Just like with a gardening analogy, it’s really important that you get to the root of what is causing you financial fear or financial anxiety. And you try to remove that, from the root. Now doesn’t mean, of course, that this is all going to go away. But I think it’s really important to get to the kind of the root cause of your financial fear. And it can help just to talk with someone else, you know, and really talk through your plan. To meet with someone, you know, Centennial Wealth Advisory and meet with prospective clients. We get to know them. It’s not just about managing their money. It’s about getting to know them as a person. What do they like and dislike? What are their thoughts towards money? How do they feel about the future? How do they feel about their current situation? And I think by walking through all these different things, it can really help you as you plan for your future. If you would like to have a conversation like that with one of our financial advisors and including myself here at Centennial Wealth Advisory, please feel free to log on to our website, cen-wealth.com. Call any of one of our five offices in Northern Michigan. We’d be happy to sit down with you to help you plan to retire well.