Ok, so, isn’t it time to bring your Psycho-Spiritual Practices to your Finances?
I have tons of tools and practices to help you become conscious with money and all that it touches in your life (hint: everything!) And I’m totally jazzed to share them with you!
At the same time, I know that many of you have already done a tremendous amount of psychological and spiritual work. What if you could bring your current practices right into your relationship with money? You can use them to illuminate the deeper aspects of your money issues. And you can use them to fuel/support the practical steps of money management.
Isn’t it time for this integration to happen?
I certainly feel so! And it can happen at whatever pace is right for you.
I can help you do this!
Collectively, we seem so ripe and ready for this.
Are you ready?
If so, you might want to refresh yourself with the article:
The Body Check In:
My Favorite Conscious Bookkeeping Tool’.
To read that article, Go Here:
Also, you may want to review my article:
Money Practice Guide, Part 1- Philosophy & Preliminary Steps.
This is a great overview to get you inspired to start, fine tune or revitalize a ‘Money Practice’ + begin to lay the foundation of the practice.
If you would like to review Part 1 again, click the link below:
Money Practice, Part 1 article, go here to my new BLoG:
And, if you need some big live inspiration on how to do this, join me for my Teleclass!
My Big Free TeleClass: Tools For Financial Transformation on 4/19
Hey folks. There are already over 400 people signed up for this teleclass.
I can feel the community energy building around it. And I am so thrilled to share with you the most in-depth overview of the Conscious Bookkeeping method to date!Once you’re signed up for the call, you can get the recording even if you can’t be on the call. So come join me, one way or the other!
YES, I want to sign up for Bari’s Free TeleClass:
Now, let’s continue with the Featured Article:
The Money Practice Guide, Part 2
Daily & Weekly Steps
Daily Practice
Before discussing the next steps of the practice, I want to acknowledge that some of you may have lots of resistance coming up at this point. Even with all your work up to now in this course, a daily practice involving money and concrete numbers can feel burdensome, exhausting, overwhelming, or simply unnecessary. I’ve even had students tell me that they delayed signing up for my course for years due to resistance to this part of it!
It’s helpful to see that this kind of resistance is based on what the mind thinks the practice is going to be rather that being based on what it actually is. This resistance usually dissolves when you start having real contact with it and see that it’s not nearly as complicated as your mind thought it would be. Another type of resistance can be a result of having a correct, but merely intellectual, understanding of the practice. This is another head trip and is very different from actually living the practice and experiencing for yourself the shifts in your daily life and the clarity and peace of mind that can manifest.
So be patient with yourself, but do go ahead and step into it. Some students find that doing some of the daily steps every few days instead of every day works better for them. Some of you have a spouse, partner, or bookkeeper who will be doing the tracking for you. I strongly recommend that, at a minimum, you connect to the bookkeeping system on a monthly basis.
Daily Steps
1. Save Your Receipts
Save all your receipts from your purchases out in the world. Place them—perhaps with a smile—into your styley accoutrement right away. If you are entering your receipts into your system every day or every couple days, you can keep them in your accoutrement until you do so. If the intervals are longer than a couple days, it can be useful to have a small basket or container on your desk where you keep your receipts while they await your further attention. When there’s some lag time in my tracking process (which does happen, though it’s rare!), I like to place a special rock on top of my small pile of receipts.
2. Tracking
Every day, or every few days, take your chocolate in hand, light your candle, turn on your music (or your version of all this), sit down, do a body check-in, and manually enter each expense into your tracking system. Via Mint, Quicken and Quickbooks – our favorite tracking tools! You may prefer to use the option of automatically downloading your data (and in Mint you will have to do it this way), but many students will get the most value from the practice if, at least for an initial period of time, you enter each item by hand, typing it into the digital register on your screen. The extra value here comes simply from having more interaction with the process. More interaction = more opportunity to witness yourself = more potential learning and growth.
3. Celebration
Gift yourself with a short, sweet celebration each time you complete a round of entering your receipts. It could be as simple as saying, “Yes!” or “Thank you” or taking a deep breath. This simple acknowledgment can help establish the practice, since a feeling of success reinforces the actions that produced it.
4. File Receipts
If your receipts are for business expenses, save them in a folder that is labeled with the corresponding expense category from your Chart of Accounts. If you have personal receipts that won’t be needed as evidence for any itemized tax deductions (such as health care expenses), you can throw them out or recycle them at this point.
Notes – Ideas – Any Additional Steps:
Weekly Practice
I’ve discussed money dates previously in terms of having them with your partner or spouse. That kind of date is typically part of the monthly practice. The money date here in the weekly practice is one that you schedule for yourself. These weekly dates will last about 20 or 30 minutes depending on your pace (which, as always, is totally individualistic).
Weekly Steps
1. Survey Your Practice Environment
Begin with a body check in. Then take a few minutes to notice your practice environment. How have you organized it and decorated it. Do you have music, candles, or other supportive features in place? Have you been bringing chocolate or other treats into the space? Has all this felt supportive to you? What might you want to adjust in your physical space or in the way that you’ve supported yourself in doing your daily practice?
Also note how many times you’ve done your daily practice that week. What’s been supporting your success in this department and what’s been getting in your way? What feelings have come up during the week around the daily practice and what feelings come up now as you’re reviewing it? Is there something you want to adjust? Perhaps changing the time of day that you’re doing the practice could be helpful. Set yourself up for success even if that means lowering your expectations about the frequency that you can manage—perhaps you aim for every other day instead of every day. Or maybe you need to look at the issue of personal boundaries if it’s difficult to carve out a few minutes of the time for yourself. Let yourself be open and curious. Make it an experiment. Have fun with it. This is all about your empowerment and, ultimately, your enjoyment. It’s not about being heavy and serious. And it’s definitely not about feeling guilty or overwhelmed or self-critical.
2. Survey Your Practical Landscape
In this step, you survey and update your practical finances. You get current with entering and filing any receipts that remain from the week. You check your balances in your tracking tool. And you check your account balances and transactions online with an eye to noticing anything that seems unusual or in error. Next, you address any money related matters or details that need some attentions, such as filing papers, sending in health insurance claims, or transferring monies between accounts.
Bill payment happens here too. Many people these days are taking advantage of automatic bill payment options. One neat feature that’s often available is to set up the date on which the payment is pulled so that it corresponds to when you get paid (if that happens on a predictable basis). You obviously wouldn’t be attending to these bills in the weekly practice. But whatever bills that are not set up for auto-pay would be tended to, including making other online payments, as well as writing and sending out any physical checks.
If you’re a business owner, you make deposits of any physical payments (checks and cash) that you’ve received in this step. If you’re getting all your payments online through paypal or other merchant accounts, then you could do a quick check to make sure everything is in order and that the money is properly reaching its destination.
This weekly practice looks and feels like a financial housecleaning. You’re looking around, cleaning up, revising, making small course corrections, and re-invoking the spirit of curiosity and experimentation. After each weekly practice, do a body check-in and spend a few minutes celebrating and appreciating yourself.
Notes – Ideas – Any Additional Steps:
Monthly Practice
Each level of the practice builds on the previous one. You do your daily tracking for 5 minutes every day or every couple days. Then you do your weekly practice for 20 or 30 minutes. Then you do your monthly practice, which will typically take about 30-45 minutes. If you’re using your tracking system to download your transactions automatically, or if your partner, spouse, or bookkeeper is doing it for you, then this is when you’ll have your major contact with your money practice. This is where you jump in and join the practice, where you build your relationship with it and cultivate a healthy sense of ownership.
To Be Continued... Money Practice, Part 3: Monthly and Yearly Steps…
