It's time to financially flourish

Financial well-being is your relationship with your finances and how your finances affect your overall well-being. Financial security is having enough money to cover your obligations and necessities, but financial wellbeing is there to help you flourish in your everyday life. Organising our finances and making sure we have a workable budget is taking care of our financial wellbeing. It’s a huge contributor to our overall feeling of control, enjoyment, and satisfaction.  It’s easy to have enough money to meet your obligations if you're working, but having enough money may not always lead to the feeling of being secure with a positive mindset around money because financial wellbeing is about having freedom of choice.

Martin Seligman is a pioneer in positive psychology using the PERMA model, a robust framework of core pillars used to measure, manage and develop wellbeing. It stands for Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement. We can use it to develop a better understanding and assess our financial wellbeing. It’s about how to feel good about the choices we make and assess our relationship with money. Our wellbeing is influenced by all sorts of things, our environment, our own personality, our home and workplace, our skillsets. The more you learn, the more you surround yourself with positive influences and the more you experience the better your financial wellbeing will become. It's about our behaviours, our reactions, and our resilience to external and internal feelings.

So how do we translate our financial wellness using the PERMA Model? We ask a series of questions and deep dive into the true nature of our spendings correlated with our emotions. Are you feeling positive about money? Are you engaged with your money? Are you feeling in control of it? Do you know where it's going? What's your relationship with money? But what's your relationship with those around you? Is money adding meaning to your life? Is it creating experiences and memories and a safe and secure home? And what are some of your accomplishments like getting a job, getting a raise, looking after your super and looking after your debt repayments?

Positive Emotions - Sometimes we are anxious, stressed or overwhelmed which can lead to increased spending, overeating or drinking too much, this is often an unconscious behaviour. This doesn't help you make the most of your money and it doesn't help you live your best life. Sometimes we find ourselves treading water with our money because we are often self-sabotaging. We're not saving, we're not investing and we're not paying down our debts because we have overspent. One external influence currently is the rising interest rates and higher costs of living which is really influencing the way that we're feeling about money and our internal scarcity mindset can lead to us creating some poor habits around the way that we're spending or saving or investing. You get caught in that cycle and spiral into self-criticism from these bad habits. You need to regulate your emotions so that they don’t pop up as overspending. One of the keys to stopping this is to express your feelings, talk about the issues, go to the gym, get into nature. Being aware of the signs before it escalates is important. What's the threat? What's the fear? Looking at ourselves deeply enough to become more mindful and happier around our money will lead to a better relationship with money.

Engagement - We need to have our money make sense, to be set up into spending and bills to ensure we cover the minimum obligations. Have enough put aside for fun spending, it’s your money, enjoy it but don’t overspend. When you're engaged with your money, when you know where it's going and what it's doing, then it's easier to feel a certain sense of accomplishment and control around it.

Relationships - Having good open discussions with your partner and your children around money is so important. I'm not saying have a financial date night every week, because, how boring. But be engaged with where your money is coming and going. If you discuss and dissect this and bring it out into the open, then you can change the habit not just for you, but for the generations around you as well.

Meaning - Finding joy in using money in your life where the accomplishment can be as simple as just going out and earning the money. Be grateful that you've got a steady income where you can spend your money with a true feeling of freedom.

Achievement – We have a need to feel good about the choices we make and need to be aware of a flow on effect of poor habits and overspending. Being engaged and in control of your money gives you a strong sense of accomplishment. A good relationship with money can give you satisfaction such as paying off your home sooner or making a smart investment. Feeling good about the choices you're making gives you a sense of achievement and contributes to your overall wellbeing.

My higher purpose in the Happy Money Journey is to get that feeling of financial wellness deeply ingrained in us, so that we're not feeling like we're constantly not good enough or we are out of control. Enjoying your own financial journey and making the most out of your money is to have a positive feeling of financial well being. It will impact and help you flourish in all aspects of your life so that you can live the actual best life that you can.