Do you know your money values? Not many people do. Working out if you should spend some money on something becomes much easier if you know your values.
Here’s a great (in less than 10 minutes) way to work our your values.
The money flowing through your life can be summarised into 8 categories.
- Career & Work
- Money & Finance
- Health & Wellbeing
- Vision & Planning
- Close Relationships
- Recreation & Enjoyment
- Personal Development & Growth
- Environment (where you live)
We’ll come back to these in a bit.
Step 1 - Money Values
Now, take out a blank sheet of paper and set a timer on your phone for 8 minutes. Write down all the words that describe the feelings that you want to have around money. Write for the full 8 minutes. These words represent your money mindset. Imagine someone looking through your spending, how would you want them to describe your money habits.
Step 2 - Rank your Values
On a new piece of paper rank all your values from step one in order of importance to you - at this moment in time. If this feels too difficult play a tennis tournament between values to see which one wins and which one loses.
Take your top 8 values and write them down somewhere you will see them every day. How about taking a photo on your smart phone and setting it as your background on your home screen?
Use your list to guide your spending each day. Will your purchase move you towards your value or away from it?
For example, if your value was ‘Healthy’ a fast food purchase might not be great, whereas a food blender might move you towards it.
Step - 3 - Put Values into your Life Buckets
Pair all of your values from step one into one of the eight buckets. Choose the top three values that you want to embody your spending in that area. Repeated values are not uncommon.
There’s no right or wrong answers. The goals here is to help you align your spending with your life.
Things change over time. That’s the nature of life. Remember, you can repeat this exercise whenever you feel like things aren’t quite right.