Motivation for Financial Management when You're Over 50 Edinburgh
By the time you’re over 50 you know that most of the success – or not – you have in life comes down to motivation. That's certainly true with financial planning and money management where we nearly all have great goals concerning saving more and spending less… but somehow they just never happen.
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Motivation for Financial Management when You're Over 50
The reason why we all tend to fail at managing our money as well as we might is that we don’t focus nearly enough on our motivation.
As we do at the outset of any major project we need to ask ourselves: Why do you want to do this? What will you get out of it? How will you do it? And, additionally, we need to ask ourselves, what will keep you saving and not spending when all you want is to cheer yourself up with some retail therapy?
We also fail because we’re unrealistic. Giving up absolutely everything which is pleasurable is probably going to make life miserable in the long term.
However, having said that, we do need to inject a very large dose of realism into planning for the rest of our lives.
Rational and realistic choices
Unless you have an oil well at the bottom of your garden your situation will be the same as it is for just about everybody else – that is, habitually finding many more ways to spend money than you have money to spend.
So you must make some choices. And not just choices about how you are going to spend money today but also how you are going to balance the money spent today with the money you will spend in the future, over the rest of your life.
The good thing about being around 50 is that provides us with some kind of a watershed to make these choices.
On the one hand, we may still have many commitments and aspirations such as mortgages, children to support, grandchildren to indulge, pensions to save for, care costs for elderly relatives, aspirations to see the world when we have the time, etc, etc.
On the other hand, time and the opportunities and energy to find the resources for all these things are slowly – but surely – running out. More and more we will have to manage with what we have, We cannot be so sure of our career prospects, we cannot rely quite so confidently on our health and we don’t have so much time to bounce back from poor investments or misjudged business decisions as we did when we were young.
It is then all the more important that we have a clear idea of our personal goals.
Priorities and objectives
Improving the motivation for money management comes down to examining how we see the rest of our lives and establishing some clear priorities and objectives.
Having done that and got a vision for the future, the financial resources that will be needed will start to emerge and identify themselves. Only then can you make some proper choices and decide what is really, fundamentally important. Is it that “once in a lifetime” trip to Australia to see your daughter and grandchildren? Or is it the daily box of chocolates and the regular £10 on lottery tickets?
Ultimately the decisions you make are up to you. But it’s no use moaning later that you don’t have the money. Your financial future is in your hands – both how you spend your money and at what rate you spend it.
The greatest danger for our generation is “feast and famine” – having it all now and nothing in the future.
With life expectancy increasing the way it is, one thing is sure. If we live as long as we should we can expect to have to eke out our savings over a very long time.
Click here for more information about Finance at Fifty from in my prime.
As we do at the outset of any major project we need to ask ourselves: Why do you want to do this? What will you get out of it? How will you do it? And, additionally, we need to ask ourselves, what will keep you saving and not spending when all you want is to cheer yourself up with some retail therapy?
We also fail because we’re unrealistic. Giving up absolutely everything which is pleasurable is probably going to make life miserable in the long term.
However, having said that, we do need to inject a very large dose of realism into planning for the rest of our lives.
Rational and realistic choices
Unless you have an oil well at the bottom of your garden your situation will be the same as it is for just about everybody else – that is, habitually finding many more ways to spend money than you have money to spend.
So you must make some choices. And not just choices about how you are going to spend money today but also how you are going to balance the money spent today with the money you will spend in the future, over the rest of your life.
The good thing about being around 50 is that provides us with some kind of a watershed to make these choices.
On the one hand, we may still have many commitments and aspirations such as mortgages, children to support, grandchildren to indulge, pensions to save for, care costs for elderly relatives, aspirations to see the world when we have the time, etc, etc.
On the other hand, time and the opportunities and energy to find the resources for all these things are slowly – but surely – running out. More and more we will have to manage with what we have, We cannot be so sure of our career prospects, we cannot rely quite so confidently on our health and we don’t have so much time to bounce back from poor investments or misjudged business decisions as we did when we were young.
It is then all the more important that we have a clear idea of our personal goals.
Priorities and objectives
Improving the motivation for money management comes down to examining how we see the rest of our lives and establishing some clear priorities and objectives.
Having done that and got a vision for the future, the financial resources that will be needed will start to emerge and identify themselves. Only then can you make some proper choices and decide what is really, fundamentally important. Is it that “once in a lifetime” trip to Australia to see your daughter and grandchildren? Or is it the daily box of chocolates and the regular £10 on lottery tickets?
Ultimately the decisions you make are up to you. But it’s no use moaning later that you don’t have the money. Your financial future is in your hands – both how you spend your money and at what rate you spend it.
The greatest danger for our generation is “feast and famine” – having it all now and nothing in the future.
With life expectancy increasing the way it is, one thing is sure. If we live as long as we should we can expect to have to eke out our savings over a very long time.
Click here for more information about Finance at Fifty from in my prime.