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The Dollars and Cents of Financial Stress:
You’ve checked
your bank account and found you have only $42 left in your savings
account. You’ve received at least three phone calls this morning
from creditors who are wondering why your payments are late. Your
car payment is due in three days and you’re not sure how you’ll
pay the bill. Last month, your landlord threatened to evict you when
your rent check did not arrive on the first of the month.
If this scenario sounds familiar,
you may be experiencing finance-induced stress. From time to time,
all of us suffer from it, to one degree or another. Financial stress
is simply a fact of modern life. No matter how hard we work, no matter
how diligent we are at trying to save our money, we may find that
we have great difficulty paying all of our bills. This can be particularly
true if we’ve been hit with a major traumatic event, such as
the death of a spouse, a divorce, or a serious illness.
Financial stress can be felt in a
number of ways. For example, you might have difficulty sleeping at
night because you are worrying about your finances. You might find
yourself short-tempered and, as a result, you might be experiencing
conflict with your spouse. You may find yourself yelling at your children
for minor infractions, or you may even be hit with panic attacks at
work.
The fact is, financial stress can
cause you tremendous physical and psychological discomfort. It can
lead to anxiety, depression, high blood pressure—even stroke.
As a result, financial stress is actually a serious, though often
unrecognized, health concern. In essence, your financial problems
may be making you sick.
But how do you address what can seem
to be an insurmountable problem? To begin with, it is important that
you go to your doctor and have a complete physical. State your symptoms,
and note that you believe that financial stress may be the cause.
Your doctor might then refer you to a psychiatrist for anti-anxiety
medication, or to a therapist who can help you work through your problems.
Next, consider consulting a certified
financial planner. He or she can help you to realize your short-term
and long-term financial goals. Don’t be embarrassed to let the
planner know the extent of your financial problems. Remember that
the only way to really attack finance-induced stress is to meet the
difficulty head-on. Trying to dodge the problem…pretending that
things are not as bad as they are…will only exacerbate your
troubles in the end.
Your financial planner will probably
want you to come up with a workable budget. It is important to be
realistic when crunching numbers. It does little good for you to come
up with a budget that looks fine on paper, but that doesn’t
work in the real world. Make sure that you budget for all the essentials—food,
shelter, clothing, medical care. And also try to budget for long-term
priorities, such as college savings or retirement. Also, don’t
forget to allot at least a small portion of your budget to recreation
and entertainment. You’ll need a few diversions in order to
be a less stressed individual.
In the beginning, you might want
to track every single expenditure that you make. This can be difficult,
especially if you’re not used to that kind of record-keeping.
But it can be quite instructive. You might not realize, for instance,
just how much money you’re spending each month on lattes, or
how much you’re devoting to the daily lottery drawing. By doing
the record-keeping, you might discover ways that you can trim your
budget without really feeling the pinch.
It is also highly important that
you save a portion of your money in order to pay for the unexpected.
From time to time, all of us are hit with bills that seem to come
out of the blue. Your savings will act as a kind of insurance policy
against disaster. With some money in the bank—even if it is
a small amount in the beginning—you’ll be better able
to weather the financial storms that come your way. And you might
find those middle-of-the-night worries disappearing, knowing that
you are doing all you can to get your finances under control.
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