How To Teach Yourself to Succeed with Money
Personal Finance 101: How To Teach Yourself to Succeed with Money
Invested Wallet
Personal Finance 101 is the beginning steps you can take to really become self-sufficient with your money. It will include various areas like understanding expenses, creating a budget, saving and investing basics, and more.
Many of these concepts may appear difficult to manage or that you must be highly educated to do so on your own. But you — and anyone — can teach themselves to succeed with money.
You don’t need to be an expert to manage your finances and you can have little to no previous background, but still gain control financially.
Below, I’ll share some of the steps I took to teach myself and hopefully you can apply this to your own personal finances. Will it be easy? No. But it’s certainly not extremely challenging either.
Changing Your Money Mindset
Before we get into my Personal Finance 101 steps, I think a big gatekeeper to managing your money successfully is your mentality and mindset.
Firstly, many times the media or financial experts make this stuff seem like complicated rocket science. Surely some aspects to finance can be, but the majority is really not. This can mess with your mindset and feelings towards money from day one. I know it did for me.
Other times, it’s easier to be in-denial about our financial situations. If you don’t pay attention to the problem, it doesn’t exist, right?
But as you know, that temporary “solution” will inevitably snowball in the future where it becomes a much more challenging problem.
Another way your mindset might be hindered is maybe you are relatively on the younger side, say 20’s to early 30’s and finances is just not a priority to you. The “I’ll worry about it later” mentality creeps in because you have time on your side.
Whatever it is, your understanding of personal finances and dedication to get it under control has to start with the right mentality. Otherwise, it won’t be a priority to you nor will you dedicate time to learning.
I unfortunately can’t give you the magic “aha!” moment or steps to get on the right mental path. We are all unique in what works.
Teach yourself about money
Personal Finance 101: Teaching Yourself About Money
Hopefully, the section about mindset made sense and did not come off has some “self-help” preaching. My intent is really to ingrain that mindset is the first key ingredient to determine your success with teaching yourself about money.
We all know saving, investing, and budgeting is important, yet so many fail to take any action. This includes myself until 2014. Why?
Nothing will change if your mindset is stuck and you lack the willingness to erase the misconception that personal finances is “too hard.”
The cycle of change has to come from within.
Usually a moment in your financial life can be the motivation and drive you need, but even then there is no guarantee.
If you don’t think you are there mentally ready yet, the steps below won’t be impactful in the long-term. And that’s okay! Work on how you can motivate yourself and get in the right frame of mind to pursue teaching yourself about money.
I realized I needed to make changes in 2013, but it took me until 2014 to really do anything about it and felt ready.
But if you are stoked, truly motivated to make changes, and understand that it will take some dedication — then you are well on your way to successfully teaching yourself.
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