More On Our Money Reflexes

What is your common reflex action when it comes to money?

When you enter a car – you reach for the seat belt. When you touch a hot object – you snatch away your hands. If a flying object comes towards you – you duck. When money comes towards you – YOU SPEND.

We tend to handle money like hot coals – spend before it burns a hole in our palms or pockets. Give it away as soon as possible. Think of something to spend it on, and if we run out of ideas, look at what our friends are doing.

Spending is an emotional decision. We make spending decisions based on our emotions and justify them with our minds. For most, spending is fun while investing is boring. Spending makes us happy. It brings new toys and new stuff, things we get bored with after a few days and look for more. Like drug addicts, we are often willing to raid our savings to indulge in the habit – spend now, think later.

The way we relate to money has been conditioned from childhood and carried into adulthood. The feelings we associate with spending are that of pleasure while saving is that of pain. We desire instant gratification. We allow the instant pleasure we derive from spending to obscure the pain of being perpetually broke after our spending exploits. We wonder why we have no savings, but keep on spending anytime money gets into our hands.

We can recondition our money reflexes to align with our financial goals and dreams. This happens when we have clear financial goals and emotionally connect to them. When you connect emotionally to your financial goals and an abundance mentality, your actions begin to line up accordingly somewhere down the line. You start to think twice before you spend, taking into cognizance the financial consequences of your planned spending actions. You start to become aware that with every naira you spend, you are making a financial choice – to be poor, middle-class, or rich. You become more aware of the bigger picture – the fact that liabilities make you poorer while assets make you richer.

Until you connect emotionally and make the switch in your mind, you may have the right intentions but keep up taking the wrong actions. You can save for a month or two, and then go back and unsave. When your money reflex is to spend, making more money will not solve your money problem. It will simply generate more spending. It is not how much you earn that makes you rich, but what you do with what you earn. If you spend more than you earn, you will look rich with a giant hole in your balance sheet. In order to take the right actions on a sustainable basis, you need to change your money reflex. need to change your money reflex.