Set forth below is a list of six tips for building self-confidence by saving money.
Building Self-Confidence Tip #1: Practice self-affirmation in a concrete way by making regular progress in your quest for financial freedom.
There is a good reason why self-confidence is hard to acquire and hard to hold. We live in a dangerous world. “Happiness can come suddenly, and then can leave you just as quick,” Bob Dylan observes in a recent song.
Many rely on self-affirmation to keep their belief in themselves strong when working through hard times. There’s a place for that. But we all at times need something more concrete to look at to convince us that we really are useful and good and special. Effective saving gives us what we need.
Save well, and each year you will acquire a greater level of financial freedom, a greater ability to decide for yourself how you will spend the hours of each passing day. That’s something real that offers solid proof that you are making progress over time in your quest to leave your mark on the world. Money in the bank is a coined self-affirmation.
Building Self-Confidence Tip #2: Think of your budget not as a spending plan, but as a Life Plan.
Things that we plan for are the things that get done. Most of us do not get excited about the idea of planning our spending for a perfectly understandable reason–a spending plan is just about money, and money is not what it is really all about, is it?
It’s not. But a budget is not properly viewed as merely a plan for spending. Most of the Life Goals we pursue are fueled by those little green pieces of paper we refer to as “money.” So when we plan what we will do with our money, we are really planning what we will do with our lives.
Make a Life Plan, and you will feel a greater confidence that you will have what it takes to stand up to the big, bad world and handle whatever it has to dish out to you. Without a plan, you are always unsteady and subject to surprise setbacks. With a plan, you have what it takes to keep your cool in the heat of life’s sometimes wicked battle.
Building Self-Confidence Tip #3: Develop the financial cushion you need to fight for a bigger paycheck.
People who value themselves and others by making reference to the size of their paychecks are fools. The connection between the size of one’s paycheck and the value of the contribution one makes to the world with the work one does is too weak for this approach to assessing self-worth to have great validity.
That said, you can’t help but to some extent to think that you are doing better with your life when you are earning more than when you are earning less, can you? I know that I always feel a surge of joy when I am awarded a pay raise, and it’s not just because I will be able to buy more stuff. It’s partly because someone whose opinion I value has made an assessment that I have done the job assigned to me and then some. That’s a confidence builder, is it not?
There are times when you have to fight for your pay raises. There are times when your employer will not turn over the money without first putting you through a tough negotiation process. Which employees are best positioned to get the full pay raise they deserve? The ones who save well.
Why? Because the employee with a nice financial cushion can afford to push harder in pay-raise negotiations. The employee who lives from paycheck to paycheck cannot afford to be too assertive. The effective saver can take the small risk of losing her job that goes with an assertive negotiating stance because her world does not fall apart if the worst-case scenario comes to pass.
Building Self-Confidence Tip #4: Develop the financial cushion needed to fight for non-paycheck conditions of employment.
It’s not just in the area of negotiating bigger paychecks where the effective saving worker possesses an edge over his peers. Those who save well are also positioned to negotiate well for non-financial benefits.
I did this when I was promoted to a new position and wanted to be sure before taking it that I would have the support from higher-ups needed for the new department that I would be heading to be successful. I had enough money saved at this point that, if worst came to worst, I knew I would be okay. So I felt comfortable pushing just a wee bit harder than I otherwise would have for what I needed.
Win that sort of negotiation, and you will feel a swell of self-confidence, I guarantee you. It’s not just that you got what you wanted. It’s that you got what you wanted by making use of your personal skill-set. Win that sort of negotiation, and you will feel like running out into the street yelling “I did it! I did it!”
Building Self-Confidence Tip #5: Use money to smooth your journey through life’s difficult transitions.
Nothing so threatens your self-confidence as working your way through one of life’s difficult transitions–the loss of a job, the end of a romantic relationship, the need to move to a place where you have few friends. Money helps.
Money allows you to respond to the job loss by putting your energies into that idea for a start-up business that you have been carrying around in your head for years now. Money allows you to respond to the end of the relationship by joining an exercise club or buying a new car or new clothes. Money allows you to respond to the need to move to a place where you don’t have many friends by meeting some at plays and by signing up for races and by going out to restaurants.
Money can provide you the pick-me-up you need when the world has let you down. It makes sense to save when things are going good to be positioned to bounce back when things go bad.
Building Self-Confidence Tip #6: Appreciate the cultivation of your unique identity that often is a part of effective money management practices.
It doesn’t take much independent thought to spend. With all the spending enticements that surround us in this Consumer Wonderland, you can spend it all just by going with the flow.
Saving is different. To save, you need to think things through and make choices. You need to say “I want the money to go here and not there.” Those choices reflect your personal take on what matters in life. They tell the world what this unique entity known as You is really all about. When you find yourself taking a path different than the one that most others take, you can’t help but develop a fresh understanding of your specialness.
Pay off the mortgage early? That’s different. Cancel cable? That’s special. Choose to spend your vacation visiting the tourist attractions in your own town? That’s unique.
People trying to sell you things often try to entice you by suggesting that buying the product or service they sell will bring out in you the better version of you lurking inside. Sometimes it’s even true. But it’s more often true that a decision to save makes you feel that there really is something about you that is–unique.
People trying to sell you things often try to entice you by suggesting that buying the product or service they sell will bring out in you the better version of you lurking inside. Sometimes it’s even true. But it’s more often true that a decision to save makes you feel that there really is something about you that is–unique.