Why you are dangerous with cash… and what to do about it

I am a procrastinator when it comes to dealing with my finances. 

I just cannot bring myself to do the things that normal adults do like move my money from one account to another with better interest rates or work out the rules of an Isa. 

Sometimes even checking my credit card or dealing with my bank feels hard and I put it off. What can I do to change this?

C.G via email

Vicky Reynal says that there are three steps that might help you deal with your finances

Vicky Reynal replies: It is so frustrating when we know what’s best to do in a situation, but we just cannot bring ourselves to make it happen.

You are not the only person avoiding attending to your finances, but to break this pattern there are three steps that might help.

First explore the psychological reasons that make this a dreaded task. Secondly acknowledge the actual cost of your avoidance and thirdly, create strategies to better manage the feelings at the source of the avoidance and to make the task more palatable and manageable.

The first one is the hardest. I think many people don’t succeed in implementing change because they haven’t successfully identified and worked through some of the feelings that lay at the roots of the avoidance. 

Many might say: ‘it’s boring to deal with your bank’ or ‘it’s just a chore that never feels as urgent as other things that life throws at me’.

However, if that were the only problem, I don’t think it would face so much resistance. There is usually more to it.

It may be that engaging with money fills you with fear. You might be afraid that by approaching the ‘understand an Isa’ question, you might begin to feel confused, overwhelmed, ashamed that you don’t understand. It may, at some level, reconnect you with memories of feeling frustrated and incapable while doing maths homework, for example, when problems felt similarly daunting. 

You see, memories of this kind – especially if instead of a supportive teacher or parent you had critical ones – could leave you with a fear of addressing finances or a concern that whoever is on the other side of the phone at the bank might judge you or leave you feeling like that ‘little girl’ in the past, who doesn’t understand and is too ashamed to ask.

Or maybe, engaging with your finances might connect with the memory of a parent becoming very anxious when opening envelopes containing bills: so you learnt to associate attending-to-finances with something troubling, carrying the potential for bad news. This might be the case even if the adult part of you knows that you won’t find anything surprising in your bank statement.

Or maybe your parents argued about finances and that too has left you with a sense that it is a subject to be avoided as it is ‘messy.’

You need to ask yourself: What is the feeling that I am avoiding by not looking at my financial to-do list?

How do I imagine it will feel when I engage with this? Try to connect the emotions to memories.

I have seen people whose parents were ‘bad’ with money become avoidant because they worry they don’t have ‘what it takes’ to be good with and carry a fear of finding out that they are, in fact, as chaotic/irresponsible/incapable as their parents.

Finding out that we carry such beliefs beneath the surface and that these are at the root of what makes it hard to approach a financial ‘to do list’, is crucial for changing it. We need to know what fears need to be managed to stand a chance of overcoming them.

Acknowledging the cost of your strategy (ie. avoidance) is important too. 

Try to have an internal dialogue about fears you have uncovered: are they realistic?

Avoidance is not serving you well financially because you are risking incurring fees, leaving errors unnoticed, missing out on better interest rates or tax-free savings, etc. It is also not serving you well emotionally. 

While you might be avoiding whatever feeling is linked to attending to your finances, you are having to manage new negative feelings, like the anxiety of ‘not knowing’ what is happening in your account and the guilt that you carry because you know you should be more on top of it. And of course, if your fear was that you’d ‘mess up’ like a parent, avoidance will only result in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To break the pattern, try to have an internal dialogue about fears you have uncovered: are they realistic? 

Can the feelings be managed differently? If the fear is of not understanding, can you – rather than withdrawing – have a note pad next to you to jot down the terms you want to learn more about and better understand? 

If your worry is that you will be faced with a task that feels too complex, can you break it down into small steps and tackle one at a time or one a day? Sometimes reminding ourselves that we are adults now with a chance of dealing with situations differently than we did as children, or even differently from how our parents dealt with them can provide enough motivation to break a pattern.

Do you have a question for Vicky? Email [email protected]