The Best Financial Advice I’ve Ever Gotten

The best financial advice I’ve ever gotten wasn’t about how to earn, save or invest money. It wasn’t some hugely frustrating story about how if I give up my daily coffee I can be a millionaire by the time I’m 50 (that one still irritates me, and I’m not even a coffee drinker).  And it didn’t require me to get advice from some fancy and expensive financial advisor.

The best financial advice I’ve ever gotten was this:

Make your money match your values.

What that basically means is that you should figure out what you care about most in life and then think of the money you have as another way to express how you feel about the world.     

Spending money as a reflection of your values is more likely to enrich your life and make you happy than simply having a ton of money. That’s good news, since most of us are never going to have a ton of money.  

But take heart. You can get oodles of satisfaction out of the money you do have.  Even if you’re just starting out and living on peanuts odds are that you’ll still able to surround yourself with the people, places, experiences and things that mean the most to you by focusing what money you do have on the things you value most and avoid spending on things you don’t really care about. 

Before you can put this advice into practice, it helps to get honest about a few things: 

   

1)  Figure out what it is you value.  This is what you, on your most true level, actually care about.  It may take some time to figure this out and it can be confusing, especially if you’re used to trying to keep up with your friends or your family or what you think other people want you to do.  

Don’t be afraid to be real with yourself, and write it down.  Make a list of the things you really, really appreciate in life.  It could be family, friends, community service, politics, music, travel, working out, food, sports, computers, fast cars, knitting, fishing, surfing, nice clothes, decorating your house, gardening, astronomy, whatever.  Circle the top four or five things that most make your heart sing, and before you spend your next dollar ask yourself if that dollar is helping you get satisfaction in one of those high-value areas of your life. 

2)  Figure out what you don’t value but have been spending money on anyway. We all do this. At one point or another our spending is disproportionate to how much we care about the thing we’re buying.  I, for one, have spent a fair amount of money on pricey clothes I never wore, designer this or that simply because it was designer, rounds of drinks at a bar when I’d rather be staying in, lift tickets for ski weekends before I admitted to myself I really don’t enjoy skiing, and on and on.  I didn’t get a whole lot of satisfaction from those things, and compared to the happiness I could have felt by putting my money where my values are, spending money on that stuff now seems like a bit of a waste.

3) Stop spending money on things you don’t really care about and allow yourself to put your resources toward what enriches your life.  Making your money match your values means you’ll have to turn some stuff down.  This can be easier said than done sometimes, mostly because it involves saying “no.”   For example, if you’d rather spend spring break relaxing at home than on a booze filled beach in Florida, you’ll have to find the nerve to tell your friends you don’t want to go. Or, when you find yourself dropping $30 on a mani/pedi every two weeks but would be just as happy to paint your toes yourself while watching reruns, stop going to the salon. It gets a lot easier once you get the hang of it, but at first it can be difficult to say no to ourselves and maybe even to our friends and our family. But just think! Saying no to some of these things means you’ll be able to say yes to more of the things that you really care about.

If you're willing to give this a try or have already started matching your money to your values, I'd love to hear about you, your values and how you're matching your money to those values.

Happy spending.