How to Shift Your Money Mindset and Escape Debt for Good

Money may seem like just one of so many areas of our life, but your money mindset does affect all the other things you have going on, and if you have debt, that might be having a huge impact on how you view money in general.

I am here today to talk to you about how your debt can affect you.

I am a money coach, and when I get on initial calls with my clients, I see immediately the impact that their debt is having on them.

Some clients start crying in the very beginning of the call, as I tell them how excited I am to have them join the call.

Some clients have told me they could not sleep the night before the call because they had been so nervous and had been putting it off for way too long.

Of course, my role is to offer support and help them feel differently, so this affects me a lot.

When I hear my clients say these things, what it really brings to light for me is the fact that money affects everything. It affects the way that you feel about money, what you attract in life, whether you feel limited in life or not, and how you feel about your job.

You might be stuck in a job you cannot stand but the pay helps pay the bills, so you are putting off your dreams and goals that you have always wanted to achieve because you feel limited by your income.

That alone can cause so much stress and anxiety when it comes to your debt, especially if you do not know where to get started managing your money.

This is where I see my place in this process. I help my clients look at money from a different point of view and see it as a tool that can help them reach their goals, as opposed to a barrier. I get them from being stressed about money to being excited with each paycheck. This change in perspective really does help people reach their goals.

When you have debt, you might be having thoughts like “I am always going to be in debt”, “Money is something that never comes easy to me”, “I am not good with money”.

That debt mindset can change the way you deal with money for the rest of your life. If you believe you are not good with money, you are not going to be good with money when an emergency happens, or when you get an income tax return. You will just blow through it and see it as proof that you are not good with money.

The way that we feel can also really take a toll on how we handle our finances. If you feel stress and anxiety about money, chances are you will not be able to financially succeed. You will be stuck in the same spot for years and years to come.

The two biggest assets that we have in life are our time and our income. The more time you continue feeling so negative about your finances, the more time you will still live above your means and keep getting further into debt.

So how do you improve your money mindset?

But there are things that we can do. First, stop consuming negative financial content. There is content out there that ridicules people for having debt, that insults them, that degrades them.

Literature, books, podcasts, YouTube channels will talk down to you as if you are not intelligent simply because you are not in a good financial place right now.

Had I consumed that content when I decided to get out of my $48,000 of credit card debt many years ago, I would not have been able to do that.

I would think that debt was just a part of my life and that I would always be in debt, so I would never get where I am today. Instead, I am debt-free since 2018, helping clients do the same thing and get empowered about money.

If you are consuming content that is negative in nature, disconnect from it, unsubscribe from it. Look at people that are positive about money. Follow my Instagram and my YouTube channel, follow Miss Be Helpful, who was such a motivational piece for me when I was getting out of my debt.

Disconnect from anyone who makes you feel less than or small when it comes to your finances. Stop saying to yourself that you cannot and you will not, because you can and you will.

Another commonality that I see with my clients, as well as myself, is that we were not financially educated. I now have two teenagers, and they were never shown in school how to manage their money, even the basics.

It is crazy that in school we are taught cooking, sewing, sexual education, how to drive, and everything else in between, but not managing our money. This is a foundation that perhaps would have helped us not get into debt in the first place.

My kids are going to have Roth IRAs when they start working full time, setting them up to retire millionaires. We were never taught about that in school.

Moreover, money is a taboo topic of conversation in so many households. In my home, we could not talk about religion, politics or money. Whatever happens in the house, stays in the house.

So if they do not teach us about it at school and we do not talk about it at home, where are we supposed to learn about money?

Anyway, what matters is not what happened in the past or what mistakes we have made. To me, mistakes are financial lessons that you learn from and then do not repeat them. What is important is what you do from this moment forward.

Think about how your money mindset is weighing you down and start slowly changing your perspective and getting rid of the negativity that you associate with your finances.

You can do anything, but it all starts with how you feel and think about your finances. So start talking to yourself in a more positive way and you will see the difference.

Money mindset

If you are in debt, do you believe that it affects your mindset? How has it changed throughout the years? What has it been influenced by? Let me know in the comments!

Next, check out these 3 Ways You're Making Mistakes at Work That Cost You Money.