Changing Your Money Attitudes
One of the biggest fears is the bracing fear of scarcity. Many women lie awake at night picturing themselves as homeless vagabonds, victims of financial disaster, fated to live in a makeshift tent, pushing a grocery cart filled with rags, dirty blankets, scraps of food, and their last $20. By focusing on these negative — and most unlikely — images, women are blinded to the beauty and bounty of life.
Basically, you need to adjust your own attitudes about money and how you will live your life. Unfortunately, women are subconsciously taught that their attitudes and behaviors should be dictated by standards set by society, advertisers, magazines, movies, television, and, increasingly, celebrities.
Alert
Desperately rich housewives? The majority of television shows depicting “real life” actually depict upper-class families, and watching them may trigger unconscious urges to over consume. Harvard professor Juliet Schor found that households that watched the most television tended to have lower-than-average savings. So turn off the television, and start saving toward your own bright future.
There are two diametrically opposed ways of looking at the world:
Out-sightedness: You feel helplessly reactive to an external locus of control, which means whatever happens is essentially unrelated to your own thoughts and behaviors — everything becomes externalized. This is also called monkey mind, a mind that doesn't retain focus and can be easily manipulated by outside forces.
In-sightedness: You have an inner locus of control. You have solid attention filters that select what's important to your mind. You know that you can choose what you think and for how long you choose to think about it. You develop a laser-like attention.
The other monkey on your back is feeling deprived. An old way of thinking might have equated frugal living with being deprived — and how it hurts to feel deprived when you're working so hard, managing a household by yourself, and raising children.
Essential
It's up to you to decide why, for whom, and for what you are living. Once you have made those choices, stand up proudly and pat yourself on the back. Live your philosophy, and in no time you'll be expanding your thoughts, your dreams, and your finances.
The trick here is to switch tracks, to literally change the way your look at your situation. You're not deprived; you are the master of your fate — you are choosing frugality. Thus, frugal living becomes an enlightened consciousness, a choice.
You aren't depriving yourself or your children. Instead, you are consciously making choices that nourish your soul and build toward real financial security. Find ways of rewarding yourself that don't have anything to do with money — take a hike in the woods, read a classic novel, take a hot bath, invite friends over for a potluck, or write in your journal.
