You no longer buy on credit; you live within your means and have found satisfaction and a renewed sense of self-respect. You no longer feel like a fraud, a faker who props up a sense of worth by what you wear and drive. You’ve made meaning of your losses and have reintegrated realistic ways to live well with the money you have.

You’re rebuilding your credit by staying on track and you are in the minority. Congratulations.

For those of you who have fallen off the track and are back to business as usual, here are some eye-opening facts and tips to rebuilding a sane and secure financial life:

Give up self-sabotaging excuses and get real about yourself and your money:

• Care about your money; no one else will care as much as you.
• Control your own purse strings; don’t hand over control to others.
• Decide your own destiny; don’t be reactive and passive.
• Be optimistic and know there is always something you can do to succeed; shame only serves as a barrier to progress.
• Watch what you do and not what you say; denial is a powerful barrier to self-awareness and truth.
• Those who place power in external forces rarely are self-empowered to achieve their goals and dreams.
• Make your own secure life and face the facts of whether you are better off using cash or credit.
• Keep working at self-discipline and living creatively and smartly with what you can afford.

Give up the myths that could tempt you to fall off your track:

• Money doesn’t buy you happiness unless you know how to make it your slave instead of your master
• Stuff is a distraction to a real sense of inner richness and self-worth
• Invest in yourself and focus on what it takes to keep you on track.
• Staying on track will pay off in a renewed sense of security and self-worth.

Mental and emotional exhaustion caused by frugality – a constant life focus of counting and pinching your pennies. Frugal fatigue causes feelings of being over-spent, exhausted, depressed without hope of any change. It’s like fighting an uphill battle without any end in sight.

How best to address it

Re-frame the feelings and beliefs that are negative, frustrating and self-defeating. Focus on the benefits of living within your means. Make frugality your choice instead of feeling you “have no choice”; focus on “can instead of can’t”.

You’re not alone in your feelings: In a 2011 survey of the NFCC (National Foundation of Credit Counseling), 2/3 of Americans have experienced it and say they have “no choice” but to put up with it – left tired and frustrated with counting their pennies. Of those surveyed, 21% experienced feeling better with lifestyle and spending changes being both positive and permanent; 5% said they would begin spending more; and 8% never made any changes. The great divide and dichotomy between the two largest groups in the survey– those feeling positive about their frugality vs. those feeling negative–lies in how they perceived the change in lifestyle and what they got as a result.

Self-regulation is the key to positive change and the many rewards in life you reap as a result:

Many people have goals but simply do not know how to reach them whether the goals are related to career improvement, weight loss, health or financial fitness.

In my experience, I can give my clients suitable solutions for their problems and predicaments – sound advice that could forever change their lives – but the unfortunate reality is that only with self-regulation will my clients appropriately implement that advice. That’s true of anyone wanting to make change breaking through barriers of stubborn habits; it takes the self-regulation to pull it through.

For any goal of positive change in lifestyle to be effective, you need to be interested in improving your own well-being and want to control your financial destiny. It is not a matter of fate, but a matter of choice and making life more positively predictable. In the process of making this lifestyle change, we go through a three-step process:

1. Become self-aware by deliberately monitoring your own behavior so this can include counting pennies, tracking expenditures. Becoming conscious is empowering giving you a choice of choosing appropriate behavior vs. unconsciously falling victim to an old less appropriate habit. Emotions are revealed in the process – you begin to see a cause and effect relationship and then have the power to change it.
2. Evaluate how the behavior affects your sense of self – feel healthier, more proud, more energetic vs. more tired, frustrated. Help yourself with some positive aids like taking a few minutes to make note of the positive actions that made you feel good and proud that day followed by three things you’d like to try again to address with better results. This step gives you the self-empowerment and feeling that you can have a sense of self-control with positive results vs. a feeling of hopelessness that change for the better is not possible.
3. It’s a simple process of changing behavior until the desired effect is realized but you have to know and focus on the desired effect. Decide upon an action plan for resolving your financial issues. In your plan, you will have to deliberately monitor the results in order to appraise the effects – checking along the way for any necessary changes in the action plan. The key issue here is your new sense of understanding the rewards of the change frugality brings and how you feel as a result.

This whole change process would be a lot easier if we lived in a culture that reinforced and rewarded frugality. We have been a culture of great spenders, living on credit putting off until tomorrow what we should really do today. Our habits are set and it’s more challenging to climb uphill than to coast effortlessly in denial of what lies ahead. But there is no choice today; no one is letting us glide by any more without paying our way in current time. Rules are changing; personal responsibility and self-regulation are the critical competencies of today for being financially savvy and secure. In my experience, it’s all about self-awareness, self-regulation and ultimately making your own rewards. No one is handing it out. If they do, beware as it’s not free – you’ll have to pay and pay even more tomorrow than today.

It’s no mystery once you take the blinders off and become aware and accountable to yourself. You can make positive change and feel better like the 21% and have a different life or you can deny reality and find yourself in the fiscal rat race and depression of a continual uphill battle of guilt, sense of failure and a depressing future. It’s up to you to make it happen by fighting the frugal fatigue and conquering it. Fatigue eventually becomes a sense of empowerment that you got through it and conquered your challenges.

Our old habits are hard to break because most of us are not aware of them–we are blind to what’s close to us and a powerful part of our reflexes ingrained over time. So, the tips that follow will focus on making you aware and conscious so you can change what you want at the time and make it stick. These tips have evolved over the years of working with clients to achieve their dreams and break through the barriers that kept them from using their money to that end. I’ve also consulted an expert in changing people’s physical wellness lives. I’ve found fiscal and physical fitness goals are often related in the process of achieving goals.

The underlying guiding principles for all successful goal achievement:

1. Attach an emotional reward to the goal. How will you feel as you achieve your goal? Or feel as you approach your goal? For example, when you pay off or as you pay off your credit card balance? Will you feel proud? Or when you begin to change your eating habits or exercise regime? Identify the feeling and emotion (s) that come to mind. Make that emotion part of the resolution and goal to achieve.

2. Make the new behavior fun recommends Lizbeth Pratt, Director of Camp Biche, a fitness boot camp in Lauzerte, France. She advises her clients to concentrate on exercise as a way to be and feel healthy. The emphasis is on the feeling aspect in the process. “We concentrate on how the client feels better when they exercise with clients commenting on their increased confidence, greater sense of personal control and vibrancy. They don’t do any lecturing but they do provide the experience to foster the emotional well-being that living healthy engenders.

3. Know your barriers and plan around them. Build your stamina to break through your barriers to change. No one will stick to a resolution unless they are ready to change states Pratt. Build up your defenses – double your efforts and focus. If you’re a procrastinator for example, don’t wait until you’ve worked a long day and don’t want to add another chore to your already-overflowing plate to work on your budget. Get up one hour earlier a day or two a week. Same holds true for that time devoted to exercise or planning your menu in a conscious way. Pay yourself first. It’s a gift to you which will pay back emotionally, physically and financially.

4. Keep your eye on the reward you seek. What’s in it for you? Identify the rewards and give yourself the praise as you start to realize those rewards. A simple daily process that will take you less than ten minutes works wonders in keeping you on track to success: Make a note of the three things you’ve achieved each day (especially in the beginning of this re-do) that make you proud. Feel that accomplishment. Now make a quick note of the three things that you’d like to improve and have an idea of how you’ll improve your efforts. Then go practice.

5. Lastly, put a positive spin on this process. You’re breaking out of your comfort zone that kept you stuck. Think and feel aspiration, empowerment and realizing your priorities and what you want most. People who achieve their resolutions outperform others because they are guided by their internal goals. They do what they do for the internal sense of empowerment and feeling proud.

The way we earn, spend, and save money is a practical expression of our most fundamental beliefs. When our money personalities are out of sync, money can become the great divide in an otherwise harmonious relationship. If the two of you are out of sync in your financial goals, the health and wealth of your partnership may be headed for trouble.

In my work, I have found that money is our last social taboo and our last frontier of self-disclosure. Historically, it has been more true for women but that gap is closing particularly with younger generations but not at the rate that I’d like to see.

As gender differences blur, what are thought of as traditionally male attitudes toward money show up increasingly among women and vice versa. That’s true also in the nine different money personality profiles and traits that drive money management that I’ve discovered and followed over the last 30 years. So, what’s important is that both members of the partnership must have the same goals and their money personality traits both working to support those goals.

By working together toward financial freedom and well-being, money can stop being a source of conflict and become a way to express our highest values while providing comfort and security to those we love most.

A new and powerful tool, Moneymax® for Couples, helps partners to bridge the emotional divide created by money in their relationship so they can make the best use of money in their lives. It is available at no cost for Valentine’s Day on www.kathleengurney.com.

Partners discover their own personality profile and then their traits are compared to their partner’s to highlight the most compatible traits in addition to those that are challenging and possible incompatibilities. Strategies and steps for mastering each of the traits provide a concrete framework and focus for partners to work most effectively together in mastering money management and investing.

What couples don’t realize is how much their disparate attitudes and feelings about money contribute to their success and satisfaction in romance and finance. Couples who understand their strengths can prosper together in reinforcing them while shoring up their differences for long-term success and joint satisfaction.

So forget roses and chocolate! Give your love the gift that keeps on giving to both your personal and financial well-being.

In my business of giving people insight into their financial behavior, I see very different approaches to life planning with very different results. Despite those differences in perspectives, they all benefit from receiving objective feedback in what they’re doing and how they would profit from incorporating another point of view.

This is a description about two very different ways of thinking about and living life. The first is what you might call the “well-planned life”, the life with purpose defined and measured by high achievement, goal-orientation and completion. This life has been described by many experts particularly in college commencement addresses. At one such address reported in the Harvard Business Review a couple of years ago, Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor, advised students to create a purposeful and well-planned life strategy early on and stick to it so that their life would be reflective of what mattered most.

For Christensen, a high achiever, life planning had been a struggle with reaching the balance between focusing on achievement of goals and spending time on less well-defined goal achievements as family and friends which don’t reveal concrete and immediate results. He gave examples of his peers who achieved great success in business but fell short in their social and personal lives with high rates of divorce and alienation from friends and family. Certainly, their new year’s resolutions would never have included such failures and discontent in those aspects of life. But, as Christensen notes, people with a high need for achievement commonly misallocate their resources favoring concrete measures such as money and career advancement.

So, if you’re a “resolver”, you’ll want to think about a more expansive plan for making your new year’s resolutions and more general life plan to include those personal and social aspects of your life that you may short-change by habit. You’ll want to jump out of your skin and experiment with a very different way of thinking and approaching life planning which will undoubtedly be initially uncomfortable.

The second way of thinking about life and how to approach it might be called the “reactive life”. This mode of thinking starts from an entirely different perspective – life-planning is not a project to be completed with a check list of objectives to be achieved, but rather an unknown destination to be explored. The belief is that, in reality, there is no way of knowing and predicting the best plan for a purposeful life or new year as external factors are unknown. These factors will play a significant role in dictating appropriate solutions to choices that may crop up.

“Reactors” scoff at regimented plans with objectives, structure and a fixed focus on purpose and goal achievement. They approach their life-planning with a set of ideals and values as a pre-cursor or filter by which they then make current decisions in how to achieve those ideals in allocating their time, talents and resources.

It’s easy from a distance to see the benefits of each perspective, but people often don’t have that ability to perceive themselves and their actions in a meaningful way while playing out their mind set and life orientation. So, it would seem a plan incorporating a balance of the two would be most advantageous.

As Americans, it’s not easy if you’re a “resolver” to deviate as we are reinforced for our concrete high achievement just as it’s a challenge to be a “reactor” following a less-defined plan in a nation of high achievers who are motivated by more concrete measures of achievement.

We have to break through those barriers and know that our goal can be balance. Once you’ve come up with and live according to your more balanced purposeful plan, life appears to unfold as a well-designed project, well-conceived from the start and adjusted along the way toward a well-balanced fruition.

Holidays pull on our heart strings in a powerful way because of all the memories they hold. With each holiday, we anticipate and search for an emotional replay of the special sentiments they evoke. We can be fooled in trying to bootleg these feelings through buying gifts, but they so often fall short of giving us or others what we all seek most; i.e. a connection to what made us feel connected and a special part of our family and friends.
The emotional equivalent is best achieved by re-enacting, recreating and sharing some of the special memories and activities that made the holidays so joyful. We all crave the special rituals that made life better, brighter and more meaningful particularly in these challenging economic times.
To make sure that we celebrate this holiday season in the most fulfilling way and with the appropriate spirit, each of us can do some soul-searching of holidays past and holidays yet to come that would be enriching. Spend some time thinking about what this holiday would look like in your mind’s eye if it made you and meaningful others feel joyful.
So, in this holiday season, let’s give thanks to our will to help ourselves live with grace and gratitude for what’s possible and act today to assure that we continue to receive life’s blessings and share them with our most precious loved ones.

On October 19, 1987 (24 years ago today), known as Black Monday on Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 508 points, an amazing drop of 22.6 percent. Approximately $500 billion in paper value was lost. Even though only 20 percent of Americans invested in the stock market at that time, the crash had a rippling effect that impacted on everything from consumer spending to pension plans.

Americans seemed remarkably calm and showed surprising unconcern. According to a Newsweek poll taken right after the crash, 61 percent of those surveyed said the crash did not necessarily indicate a serious downward economic trend, and 63 percent said the decline in stock prices might help the economy in the long run forcing the government to face up to economic problems.

Likewise, a Los Angeles Times poll found that 64 percent of Americans thought the odds were better than fifty-fifty against a recession. The Times poll also found that stockholders who lost money in the crash were not discouraged about the stock market. According to the poll: 69 percent of the stock market losers said they do not plan to change the level of their stock investing, and only 12 percent plan to cut back.

Why such confidence in the face of loss? Psychologically, when we make a commitment to something – e.g., the stock market – we tend to rationalize any conflicting information and avoid behavior that would alter the commitment. We are all creatures of habit. In addition, some of the investors – those that did not sell their stocks immediately and impulsively – may have felt a momentary psychological loss but maintained their position, never incurred a financial loss and actually saw a great financial gain. As a result, the stock market, which had such allure for many Americans, continued to hold its magical luster even in the face of such a significant economic crisis.

The Great Recession certainly has had a longer-lasting effect for not only stock holders but for most Americans who sit on the sidelines. The incredible rebound experienced after “Black Monday” only strengthened the allure of Wall Street but the long-lasting aftermath of the Great Recession has left American investors searching for the crystal ball to reveal whether the stock market is still the answer to money growth and ultimately their financial security. They no longer trust or believe in “money magic” on Wall Street.

Americans have traditionally succeeded through determination and applying their energy to excel toward achieving their objectives. They’ve been rewarded with a sense of a quality of life for themselves and loved ones. They could see and feel a direct link between their efforts and their achievements. That link is lost and with it they lost a sense of themselves and confidence that their efforts would pay off.

As Douglas Rushkoff stated in his article, http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/opinion/rushkoff-occupy-wall-street/index.html stated ”…the members of Occupy Wall Street may be as unwieldy, paradoxical, and inconsistent as those of us living in the real world. But that is precisely why their new approach to protest is more applicable, sustainable and actionable than what passes for politics today. They are suggesting that the fiscal operating system on which we are attempting to run our economy is no longer appropriate to the task. They mean to show that there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture.”

I’ve also been a bit mystified that many are criticizing the rallies and demanding an agenda, consensus and specific goals. No, it is certainly not a traditional protest but rather seems to be people coming together in a creative way to try to get some sense of connection. It must be gratifying that they can still make an impact and have some sense of control over their current condition. Eventually, I believe they’ll begin to make sense of their conversations and connect the dots but right now I believe this rally is a great release of pent-up frustration and a means to jointly combat feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and even depression.

As a psychologist, I have listened to people coming out of a personal state of depression who have described their new sense of themselves in similar ways that the protestors are revealing in their signs with slogans such as “we are the 99%–we were asleep and now we woke up”; “money talks too much”; “you’re not listening”; “enough”.

A good therapist understands that expressing feelings early on in the healing process is extremely cathartic and helps tremendously in the rehabilitation process. A good therapist also understands the critical role that an objective and active listener plays in tracking, conceptualizing and summing up so that the feelings can be shaped and framed positively in formulating suitable solutions.

These rallies can also progress from venting of feelings to fact-gathering and formulating suitable solutions. The process can follow that of a successful mental health intervention from feelings first, interpretation through active listening and framing suitable solutions so needs are heard and met. If the rallies are successful, the process of healing will be interactive and include not only the venting of a great sense of betrayal but the active listening and formulation of ideas and strategies to meet their needs and wants.

The people I spoke with had haunting memories of that day which included knowing exactly where they were and how they felt. A common reaction was “apocalypse”, a feeling that the world as we know it was coming to an end, tremendous sorrow and paralyzing fear.

The powerful impact of fear is what played out in their descriptions of how their lives have changed living thousands of miles from the US shores. I was reminded of fear’s powerful potential and often realized crippling effect on how we live our lives.

For many it’s the fear of traveling far from home; the fear of loss which prevents gain; the fear of being powerless and destitute. As a psychologist who has focused on the impact of fear on financial lives, it plays out as a self-fulfilling prophesy too often inhibiting initiative, taking risks and being pro-active with the money we earn and save.

We have to admire those that push through their fears and act in spite of feeling traumatized and immobilized by fear. It never ceases to amaze me in seeing how “taking action” despite a lack of confidence, sense of dread or worry can be the magic antidote for an otherwise crippling condition.

For me, the memory of 9-11 will be a symbol of that courage to act with a sense of conviction and courage to face fear that often translates into a sense of confidence, empowerment, and sense of fulfillment. If we don’t face it and act in spite of it, we become powerless in so many areas of our lives and feel a sense of void and pessimism instead of fulfillment and hope.

So, living our most fulfilled life may be letting go of fear.