by admin | Sep 16, 2022 | Simple Self Help
When your heart is pounding with fear and your own sense of well-being is shot through with recent concerns, worries and disappointments, you have to a call a "Time Out!" If you find yourself ground down towards a physical and mental halt, then you have to say aloud that "Enough is enough!" and really mean it.
If you are not there for yourself then who else are you truly able to be there for?
When you find yourself sinking into the mire how can you possibly expect to be a firm foundation or a bedrock for someone who might need you and your support?
You have to stop doing what is no longer working for you. Say "no" to those activities or actions that drain and exhaust you. Stop associating with the people who draw the life force from you. If this sounds drastic, please face the alternative - allowing things to get worse and with your permission and agreement!
Think about those activities, social gatherings and relationships that literally 'take it out' of you. The 'it' is the energy, vibrancy, color, warmth and personality that is the true you. If you engage in activities that affect you less than positively you need to rethink your involvement in them.
And guess what? As you withdraw from such non-beneficial or even destructive things, you will feel stronger, enjoy more time for you, re-charge your life battery and see your circumstances reframed anew.
The more you do this for yourself, the sooner you will see a shift in what happens around you. Call a halt to the activities, interruptions, time wasters and resource drainers that serve you not at all. Strike them out of your diary and from your schedule wherever possible, replacing them with time for yourself, for your passions, your own sense of living your life on purpose.
Listen to your own inner mind, to the wisdom that is always close at hand for you. Ask your inner guide for assistance in finding the access to what is right for you. In a place of calm within you, step to the sounds and colors that attract you, nourishing you in this time of quiet.
This is your life and you can hold the reins and step towards your greatness. No need to apologize, to explain unless you want to, or to feel that you should give up any more of who you are. Make today your day and only allow into it those things that lift you and strengthen you.
by admin | Sep 11, 2022 | Declutter
Energy is the movement and vibration between molecules and atoms. It is the stimulation between people. It is the way that a particular piece of music fills a room but also the response it triggers in your brain and emotions as you pick up on the melody or tune in to receive the specific lyrics. You might choose the music when you have a meal with a friend. You would certainly be conscious of the music in your chosen playlist when you have friends around to celebrate a birthday or a special event. You are selecting the energy for the occasion.
Cherish your Special Things
In the same way you are bringing energy into your house with the possessions you bring in, with the art you place on the wall, with the fabrics that adorn your furniture. You think you feel good about a box of letters on a shelf in your study that were written to you by a grandparent or a best friend. You occasionally take out an school report that was written about you by a favourite teacher when you were a happy seven year old child and saw the whole world ahead of you. When you pull up a blanket on a chilly autumnal day and take comfort from knowing it has been made of pieces of fabrics that were once a childhood eiderdown, a grandmother's scarf and a service uniform belonging to a parent, this is good energy. When you look at old photos of a relative you never really liked, but which you feel awkward throwing out, whether for guilt or misguided loyalty, this is low energy that you don't need to hang on to. The colours, the textures and the emotions you attach to the things within every room of your home, all of this, either contributes to or takes away from the energy of your home.
Check your Digital Energy
If we ever doubted our connection to the world around us, or thought we were separate from the world and living in a bubble, then the great technology advances we have at out fingertips serves to prove the truth of this connectivity. Digital energy is a vast aspect of the energy in our homes. The movement of data, of the pulsing of electrons in and through our home space. We are constantly connected to the external world through our laptops and cell phones. That fast moving, invisible activity consists of data all around us.
The advantages are massive and such technology can help us live more positive lives, provide us with home delivery of millions of items (not so good when you are looking to let go of clutter!), make contact with friends who lives hundreds of miles away or across the globe, to bring access to jobs where we can find what will suit us, allow us to find a partner through dating apps, give us the edge for investment tips and know-how, or simply allow us to plan a holiday or a trip without the need to go into a travel shop for such information. All of these and a hundred other advantageous uses of technology and connectedness are good for us. But we have to guard against overload on ourselves. You must take care of the potential drain on your personal energy that such digital activities can have.
Why do you feel tired after an hour online just browsing and following digital connections through adverts or social networks, articles or video clips that entertain? Partly because of the huge variety of visual images you see in that hour, but also you feel tired because the energy is moving so fast through and around you. You can be too open to the draining impact of this frenzy. Give yourself times when you are not online, when you are not connected digitally. You can switch of wifi while you sleep. You can choose to leave your handset in another room when you are spending time with loved ones. You can switch off sound based notifications and limit the time you spend engaged with or sucked in to social media. They are forms of high speed energy and you need to choose whether they contribute to or take from your own levels of energy and aliveness.
Ask yourself some simple questions about how you use the spaces in your home and why :
Which area of the home do you feel happiest in?
Where is the emotional heart of the building?
When you have guests to visit do they move naturally to stand and chat in and around the kitchen or an open living area? Do they want to sit outside on the deck with you or gather around a sofa and comfy chairs?
Are there pictures on the walls of your home that you don't like, but have never let go of? Can you understand the emotions that are triggered or blocked when you consider these images?
When you are following a painting or drawing or collecting hobby at home, where do you notice yourself sitting?
by admin | Sep 7, 2022 | Simple Self Help
Many of us get locked into a routine of traveling to and from work in order to do something we dislike or even despise. We buy ourselves travel tickets or pick up transport costs in order to get to this place, where we are often surrounded by people we care little for, and produce output we may have no connection with or little pride in. There is so much more to life than this.
You know that you have talents. It is just that you are often the very last person on the planet who will acknowledge that you have them, cautious and in denial as you can sometimes be. Hobbies, intellectual skills, passionate interest, technical curiosity or just a willingness to learn a new skill set. It does not matter what the skill set or special ability is so much as you being willing to spot it and acknowledge it for what it is - the seed of new potential.
Consider that there are people making a living from every single possible profession and occupation, and many of them do very well. If in doubt pick up a commercial phone directory or look at a Local Pages website showing you the businesses in your own area. From Antiques to Zoology people are making a good living or a decent income for themselves in activities they enjoy.
Through the expression of ourselves in our work, we also find connection to others. Maybe you achieve this through your job networks, or perhaps though the people you meet via the place you work and the associations you can make indirectly.
And many of them don't go to a distant work place in order to be successful. Thousands of people in your area work from home doing something that pays its way. This may be via email, a web page, a mail-order operation, broking deals by telephone, or liaising between people wanting their skills. It does not matter what they do so much as it matters that they do something they are motivated by.
Identify your own skills and passions and look to create a revenue for yourself that you can build from home, or that you can sell with confidence to a prospective employer who would rather have excited and motivated people on their staff team.
In encouraging you to explore the enjoyment of your work, I also want you to get closer to that place of attaining financial freedom. This is the freedom that you have when you never omit doing something for lack of money and that you never do anything that you don't want simply to get the money that is being offered.
If I put this another way, financial and emotional freedom is putting money to work for you instead of you having to work for money.
In order to make your own financial success it will help you greatly to build yourself an affluent mindset, a prosperity consciousness. This means that you can operate successfully and easily in the material world whether you have money or not. This is what a prosperity consciousness does for you.
A simple exercise to identifying work that can be enjoyable and which can sometimes lead to a new self-employed career was shared with me by my friend and mentor Jim Leonard. You simply take a piece of paper and a pen and spend a few minutes writing down your ten favourite pleasures.
An Exercise!
This is the simplest of exercises and yet it can be worth enormous value to you in terms of both fun, and money!
First, write down the ten things you most enjoy doing.
Next, have a look at these ten activities and underline the one which you enjoy most of all - and the one which you are the most willing to receive money for doing!
Now, looking at that same list and at the very favourite activity which you have chosen from among the ten, work out how you can provide a service with that activity. Write down ten ways in which you can receive money from providing this service.
Choose one that you enjoy and have a go at it for a few weeks. Once you have developed money from the idea move onto another manifestation of money with a different idea or service. You will then find it is very easy to produce money when you want it. Once you can produce money at a sufficient rate for your needs, you will begin to develop the ability to create funds flowing in while you are asleep, or when money is the last thing on your mind.
I would ask you to consider this point, that putting time and focus into developing and creating worthwhile work is one of the highest callings you can follow.
by admin | Aug 28, 2022 | Declutter
Your home is alive and existing as energy. You are not separate from your home because it is a part of you. It is a reflection of how you think and feel, just as much as you develop by the way you personally interact with the space that is offered to you. The rooms of your home are a representation of how you think and feel, a reflection of your own energy.
Everything in life is composed of energy, of molecules and tiny atoms clustered together as different forms of 'stuff'. Wood and plastic are different materials, but each composed of a set of compressed atoms. Oak, pine, larch and sycamore are all wood types, albeit with a different composition. They each have their own form of energy and this is what you pick up on when you touch the different things in your home. Add to the physical makeup of each item, the emotional energy attached to every piece of furniture, glassware, DIY tool, or art work, books, clothing and bikes.
If your home is a place of harmony, love, hope and goodness, then it stands to reason that it should first be a place of sanctuary for you. It needs to be a space where you can be relaxed and completely yourself. For this to happen to the best degree possible you need to tailor the space you live to meet your own character, aspirations and to work with and support your own value system. This is where you spend your most relaxed time, where you are private and alone, as well as where you can relax with friends and with loved ones. A home is where you can be at your most vulnerable and most intimate. Here you can be completely true to your best you.
To fulfil so many functions energy moves, shifts, surrounds and connects the spaces within your home. You are sensitive to light, texture, movement, to stillness, to chatter and to music. In a location where you eat, love, bathe, create, worry, aspire and give momentum to ideas and projects, this connecting energy is everything. Distraction, concerns, low energy, sad areas, fluctuating temperatures, and anything which pulls you from living your best life at home will harm those aspirations, slowing down your creative and communicative elements. These sentient or emotional forms of energy will hold you back from the best. Visual distraction, untidy rooms, chaotic kitchens or unclean bedrooms and living rooms all conspire to prevent you living at your best levels of energy.
You cannot have friends round for drinks or a meal if the space for them is not made special, cleaned and tidied. The visual pull of dirty laundry in a guest bathroom, or of dirty and unwashed crockery on a kitchen surface, or of shoes and coats seemingly abandoned on the hall floor - none of this is good energy. Such presentation of your home space is neither uplifting, welcoming or special. Why do you tidy up for guests? Why do you want to create a clean and tidy environment for visitors? Forgive me for stating the obvious, but you put effort in so that the energy of your home is positive, welcoming and active for your visitors. That is just the publicly visible elements of your home and the energy associated with those situations.
Just as obvious is the energy present in your private areas of the home. Wardrobes, or laundry basket, or the drawers where you keep your underwear and handkerchiefs, ties and scarves or mufflers. When you open a drawer and it is a disorganised mess, you feel heavy and fed up, knowing that you now have to hunt around to find two separate socks and make a pair. Instead, if you open that same drawer and every separate sock has been paired correctly with it's other half, or your hankies are folded neatly and lined up behind one another and easy to see, how do you feel now? That sensation of ease you get when you know where everything is, this too is energy presenting itself to you.
There is much less stagnant energy in the drawer or the organised wardrobe. You are helping yourself by lifting the energy in your home. When you are not distracted by mess, clutter or chaos, you have higher energy to be you and to do what you want to do. Faster and with greater focus.
by admin | Aug 19, 2022 | Simple Self Help
Letting life get on top of you to the extent that you are personally, both physically and emotionally, dragged down by it is the beginning of a slippery slope. There are no hard and fast rules as each of us is different in our circumstances. However, it is easy to find yourself living for other people, for someone else's priorities or diary schedule, leaving very little for yourself. You get physically spent and come home at the end of each day, wiped out, exhausted, unable to make a move other than perhaps a grab for a drink and some fast-food and the TV remote control.
Time is just as much a resource as money and yet we still often struggle with the concept of paying ourselves first. Let me explain. When your income comes in each week or each month, if you will first take 10% of the gross amount and pay it into a savings account, before allowing the rest to be spent on the day to day bills, you know with total certainty that you will have one months income set aside in just ten months, two months in twenty months, etc.
You can recognise the sense of making an investment in your future finances starting now. With this being the case it is surely a simpler thing to invest in your own well-being, and to look at you and your own energy levels and see whether they are up and going up higher, or down and falling. But if I ask you to take your calendar and look at the commitments you have given to other people, what have you got in there for yourself? I am willing to bet that you have given so much away that you have little time in there for yourself.
You need to stake a claim for yourself and be in the place that allows you to nurture yourself and see your own growth. This is what I mean by putting yourself first in your diary.
At the start of this coming week, mark out the diary time you want to set aside for yourself and your values. Do this for the hobbies and activities you want to get on with, and on which you have constantly been procrastinating. There is no-one else out there who will value your own time as much as you can, yet you have to seize the moment and set aside that time as special for you. Do not allow someone else to dictate your diary after work hours.
If your work hours are not productive for you, or if the schedule you work is proving to be counter-productive to leading a life of success and happiness, then you have some planning to do and a decision to make about what it is that you truly want your life to look like. When someone wants you to give them an hour of your life and asks that you give away this time for free, be clear with yourself that such a meeting has value and is either inline with your own intended success or is instead an unproductive distraction. Where that person requests an appointment and you have no wish to give your time away, say so, but feel confident about simply saying "I already have a prior engagement" without feeling the need to say what else you are doing.
Start this week and make a planning appointment with yourself. Could you put thirty minutes each day in your diary that is just for you? What about sitting down and blocking out one day each month that is your day? You could binge watch a series, go out with friends, take part in a class. You could do all three in one day. The point here is to give yourself some time for you.
It could well be the beginning of a wonderful new phase in your life where you begin to see and to experience that you are really free to choose to do those things that you love and enjoy. This will bring you so much benefit that you will find doors opening to you and new people coming into your life with every wish for your best.
by admin | Aug 14, 2022 | Declutter
The place you call home is a special place because you intentionally chose it. Of course there may be a few exceptions where you were given no option about living there, or because you inherited it. Bummer! Seriously though, you did choose to rent or buy or move to this place which you call your own space, the place you live and where you have stamped your style.
When you stand in the front doorway of this place how do you feel?
On the first day you saw it as an empty space and before you started to bring in your own things, can you recall the emotions you felt as you looked around? It's no accident that you live here.
Sure, there may have been a round about way by which you made the journey to end up in this location and in this apartment or house, but this is where you are. Deal with it and accept it. Now you can truly make the space your own.
The place you call home is connected with all the other spaces around you and the world you inhabit. It reflects you by the way you store things there and by what you bring into the home. As your habits and collections and accumulation changes, so too does the mood and energy of the home adapt to this. Your space is a being in the sense that it is a happening, adapting, changing place as a result of how you, your possessions and your guests, visitors and family members interact with it. Even if the items in the building do not change or swap around for months at a time and the general energy of the house is low, quiet and close to static, you are still moving in the space, the contents of the food cupboards are constantly changing, post is delivered, new items from shopping trips come into the space and other things are used, finished with and removed from the space. In this most basic way there is subtle change each and every day, even though at first glance we might not realise this.
Your home is alive and existing as energy. You are not separate from your home because it is a part of you. It is a reflection of how you think and feel, just as much as you develop by the way you personally interact with the space that is offered to you. The rooms of your home are a representation of how you think and feel, a reflection of your own energy.
Everything in life is composed of energy, of molecules and tiny atoms clustered together as different forms of 'stuff'. Wood and plastic are different materials, but each composed of a set of compressed atoms. Oak, pine, larch and sycamore are all wood types, albeit with a different composition. They each have their own form of energy and this is what you pick up on when you touch the different things in your home. Add to the physical makeup of each item, the emotional energy attached to every piece of furniture, glassware, DIY tool, or art work, books, clothing and bikes.
Ask yourself some simple questions and listen to your answers:
- Which area of the home do you feel happiest in?
- Where is the emotional heart of the building?
- Which part of the house do you gravitate towards when you feel unwell because in this space you feel cosy, safe and cared for?
If your home is a place of harmony, love, hope and goodness, then it stands to reason that it should first be a place of sanctuary for you. It needs to be a space where you can be relaxed and completely yourself. For this to happen to the best degree possible you need to tailor the space you live to meet your own character, aspirations and to work with and support your own value system. This is where you spend your most relaxed time, where you are private and alone, as well as where you can relax with friends and with loved ones. A home is where you can be at your most vulnerable and most intimate. Here you can be completely true to your best you.
by admin | Aug 10, 2022 | Simple Self Help
You created these wonderful little people. They came into the world because of you. Take the time to consider the many wonderful things you can do to make their life a little better for having been here.
I don't care whether you are still with their other parent, and what happened between you along the way. To a large extent this does not concern me, except that it does as the father of two children myself. In fact I get riled when I hear people say that a single parent, regardless of whether they are raising the child or not, is of less value than two parents who raise their children together. You created a child in love and you have a responsibility, no matter the distance that may exist between you today.
Leaving an emotional legacy does not mean something that they only consider or discover after you have gone, though that in and of itself could be a nice thing for them. Instead I mean that your child would one day feel they know you better if you can tell them what it was like for you when you were a kid, that they could derive confidence and knowledge from understanding how you got through the tough times, which ones made you want to give up and how you overcame the challenges that allowed you to be who you are today.
Does your child know what it was like for you to grow up in the street where you lived?
Do they have any idea about the crush that you had on that other child in the second year at school, or the way your class teacher would tell funny jokes and make up crazy stories on the school bus when you went to the swimming baths with your whole form from school?
Have they ever heard the songs that your own parents would sing you to sleep with at night, or seen the words to that song written down for them? I know I have and I am so much richer for the experience.
What about the plays you were in at school or the friends you had in the youth club, or the choir, the cadet force, the community walking holiday or the summer camp, or whatever story you have to tell them?
Can you remember that time when you learned that the world was not just the place where you lived, and that there was even more out there than you had ever dreamed possible?
How about the time that your grandparents showed you some piece of their own history, and you sat and listened to them telling you about how you were a part of that history yourself? It could have been a photograph, a map, a medal, a uniform, a programme from a play that they were in or an ancient playground game they had enjoyed as a child themselves.
Take the time to get this down and shared with your own children because one day they may well want to have a sense of belonging to the family and need to tell the story to their own children.
I remember a walk in the countryside with my Dad Peter, my Grandad Tom and my great Grandpa Charlie. For years it was a sort of imagined color movie scene, vague and blurred in my mind. Then when I was in my forties and had two sons of my own, my father found and gave me a photograph of that day and made it seem more real and more special than ever before. It also showed me that my memory of those happy times as a toddler had been right.
Just writing about that discovery brings tears to my eyes again today, but do you know what? The fact that the picture existed and my Dad gave it to me in an electronic or digital scrapbook of family pictures meant so much to me and I have shared these images with my own boys, explaining to them who was who in each picture and hoping they may one day be motivated or interested enough to do the same.
So get on with it soon. Put that scrap book together for them to have something special to hold onto, to look back at and know where they came from. Include in it some pictures you drew as a kid yourself, a photograph, a few pages from an old school report, some stories about your parents and the places you have lived, a diary extract, a letter from a relative, or a joke from an old school friend.
Leave them with something that reveals more of you and allows them to know what a wonderful human being they came from.
Take a chance and spend some time simply being yourself with them. Allow them the chance to see the open, friendly, loving and caring person inside you and they might just remember that moment for the rest of their lives.
And always, always, no matter how far you may be from them, remember their birthdays, for the day they came into the world was then and always will be truly special.
Just like them.
by admin | Aug 4, 2022 | Declutter
In our current state of digital connection and constant online access there is always a temptation, a distraction away from the core values we once driven by. How many hundreds of times have you sat at your laptop or device with the intention of taking 10 minutes to connect and catch up before getting on with the core task that you wanted to focus on and to achieve for the day, only to find yourself two hours later, adrift in the weird world of social media and without the energy or perhaps even the memory for that quickly forgotten priority? Apparently, we can check our mobile phone as much as 150 times in a day! Yesterday I read an article which claimed we spend 2 hours and 40 minutes scrolling through social media in a day! That's just an average.
Everyone wants your attention, from Facebook, to Instagram, to LinkedIn, Spotify, and Snapchat. You receive updates from coupon companies, cinema promotions, local events, requests for a Like from a business, an invite from a friend who is starting a side hustle. Someone likes a Tweet you made, so you look at their profile and their feed for anything of interest. The technology behind the cell phone in your hand is far greater than a corporate super computer from twenty years ago. Each time you check a feed or a status update your brain gets a dopamine kick that serves your need for more points of data consumption. Friends of friends or even perhaps your own friends are - according to social profiles - leading lives of incredible ostentation, shopping, overseas travel and perfect family lives. Or so it seems when you click and watch, click and gawp, click and waste your time.
You have the ability to use online access thoughtfully and consciously, so why don't you. If you work eight or nine hours a day and come home to look at your screen while eating instead of connecting with family, if you lose hours every evening in wandering from one digital feed to another, then you can lose dozens of hours in a week. That same time, when used with deliberation and intent, can deliver to you additional free time for family, for love, for the accomplishment of your goals and for the investment of your energies into activities and hobbies that you love.
Spending time in these chosen blocks of time is what makes you who you are at your best, allows people to enjoy your company, and gives you that connection to the values you hold so important and which - if I were to ask you about them - you could reel off easily. What matters is not being able to talk about them, but having the ability, capacity and available time to spend your energies in such actions.
Rather than engage constantly with your screen take time to consciously look at the world we inhabit, to have eye contact with people as you walk on a street and travel on a bus or a tube. To look up at the signs and art and window displays and at the great kindness and beauty around us. To connect with people rather than pass them by without even realising they were in the same space as you.
You can create some simple rules for yourself, or guidelines if you want to be less dramatic or at risk of your own control.
Here are some practical steps to reduce time lost forever to the state I refer as 'device addiction'.
1. Switch your phone off for certain times during the day
2. Don't have it in your bedroom at night.
3. Have regular times when you are not accessible by phone.
4. When you are in one call do not put the first person on hold to take the second call.
5. Use voicemail as an aid to help you reduce stress, only pick up messages on a regular basis, perhaps twice a day or four times a day and not just because your phone beeps to tell you there is a message.
6. Have separate email accounts for different roles of your life so you only check the one that is relevant at a given moment.
7. Check your personal email just once a day. It really can wait.
8. Check your work email at certain times throughout the day, perhaps twice in the morning and again twice in the afternoon.
9. Use a footnote in your outbound emails that suggests the timescale within which you will review and respond.
10. Set up an auto responder to incoming email that clearly states your availability or lack of availability to respond.
by admin | Jul 22, 2022 | Simple Self Help
Fear can be crippling in the way it affects your thinking and begins to push its way into your conscious and un-conscious thoughts. The fear of the unknown is one aspect that can be dealt with in a logical way, i.e. if it is unknown then there is an element of being able to contain and explain the fear.
However, where fear is about exaggerating existing ills or troubles and making them many times worse, this can be destructive to those experiencing the fear as well to the people around the person with the fears. You know that the damage from an accident has been limited to a certain amount, or that the nature of the relationship is such that when one person says this the other always says that, but does nothing more. Yet, when fear takes hold of a view on perhaps the damage from the accident or the anger within the relationship, fear will magnify the issue far beyond realistic proportions and can cause huge pain and suffering where the person going through the fear is unable to assert his or her reality onto the fearful thinking.
The exaggeration of small concerns or fears can be such that one party in the conversation or relationship can see the distortion that the person going through the fear can no longer perceive. When this happens it can be very challenging for the observer to stay within the context of the conversation or discussion before the whole situation grows out of proportion.
Seeing only from a perspective of logic is not always helpful to the person experiencing the fear either! Many times I have heard from clients where one person is in the grip of a fear that they cannot truly explain to their more logical partner. Sometimes the best solution is not for a solution to be found at all, but for the person going through the fear simply to be heard out with what is hurting them and causing them such anguish. They may just need to be heard, not provided with the answer.
As human beings there is an ancient survival need for us to experience elements of stress, worry and fear. How else would we have survived attacks from sabre-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths millions of years ago if it had not been for these emotions giving us the 'fight or flight' response to imminent danger? But the tigers and the mammoths have been replaced by utility bills and corporate takeovers that threaten potential redundancy; by the mountain of email where each sender expects we will respond to them immediately; by the pressure at work and socially to conform to the expectations that co-workers and neighbors have of us in those situations. No wonder we get to feel the stress, worry and fear as we go through our own daily lives.
But, and this is a big but, there is no need for us to let the three demons of stress, worry and fear intimidate us and force us to lower our heads in submission. Life is filled with staggering opportunities, and with tremendous scope for joy and satisfaction. Yet it seems that the more automated, structured and digital our lives become the easier it is to be overwhelmed by the amount of data traffic, conversations, work transactions, social media posts and information we need to manage and handle. As a result it is hardly surprising that we begin to get to the place where we feel scared, worried, concerned and anxious that we will be unable to cope.
Instead, acknowledge what you can and cannot tolerate as acceptable levels of stress and worry and begin to eliminate the causes of those, to reduce the impact of the various pressures and to work our corrective changes to what you are going through in order to reduce the stress you are presented with.
Life is not easy when you are facing such pressures, but it is important for you to consider what is and what is not acceptable in terms of the causes. Where possible, take action to correct what is not working and to see what is out of context with your own value system. So often the issues can be diminished by seeing how they are out of sync with what matters to you in the first place, and adjusting from there.
by admin | Jul 21, 2022 | Declutter
Financial clutter is less obvious to the eye than old furniture, unused toys, or ugly crockery. Bank statements, paperwork in envelopes or piles of unopened post, these items can be without order and difficult to navigate.
Are all your paper bank statements in one place and easy to access in just five minutes? The chances are high that you don't keep all your financial information in one place, that as new paperwork comes in to your home it does not systematically end up in the same place that you keep and store your financial records. This is simple to change, and requires only that you become conscious of it. Resolve this quickly and simply by keeping all financial records, statements and passbooks in the same location in your home.
Start with your bank statement and look at all the transactions for a two month period and particularly at the regular and committed payment arrangements you have set up. Are any of these for Shopping Clubs you no longer participate in, for incentive and Discount Clubs where you joined to save money and yet never have enough money to spend to qualify for the Sports and Leisure or Dining Club activities you were seduced by to begin with. If you find any of these regular payment programmes, cancel the payment and cancel the commitment. Just three or four such items at $10 to $20 a month will save you $300 - $400 and more this year. Keep that money in your account and get the potential benefit of being able to ask for a discount the next time you are going to buy something significant and have the cash available for the barter.
What about the files, binders and unopened Financial Post that is stashed randomly around your home? Get these all out and in one session go through them. If you have any papers that are more than a year old shred and dispose of them. A small shredder for your home will occupy far less space than the volume of unneeded statements, letters, documents and general papers that are taking up space in your life and adding to the stagnant energy. If you run a business from home you will need to check with your Tax or Revenue office about the timescale for keeping all financial transaction records, and comply with these requirements. In many cases keeping the detail for the past twelve months and good annual summaries for the previous five to seven years is more than adequate for you and allows for a lot of discarding.
Stay up to date with Financial Apps that allow you to track your spending or monitor your investment monies easily and all from your phone or laptop. Have you looked at installing a Water Meter to your home so you only get billed for your actual use? How about asking your Energy Company for a free Smart Meter to monitor your home usage of gas and electric?
I maintain several properties that we rent out to individuals on a room by room basis. Each house requires a folder for utilities, tax records, rental income, finance costs, cleaning services, purchase of furniture, bedding, carpets and maintenance work. Each house has a subsection within a folder for tenants, all filed alphabetically by surname. One year after a tenant leaves I shred all records of correspondence with them and all their personal details. The housing paperwork is our largest block of paperwork for any ongoing theme and still it only fills a dozen large binders. I don't keep those at home, but instead maintain the paperwork in a small office cum storeroom in one of the buildings. The new space for paperwork has come about by adding upright bookshelves to a small room and using these for keeping stuff neatly and off the floor. Before I got organised and started the letting go process, I had paperwork all over the place and wasted a few hours each week looking for documents. In the old days the paperwork, post and document files, tool kits, tins of paint, and new bedding sets messily took up a room that has now been let as a tidy and well furnished bedroom. The difference in getting organised for just this one example can easily be measured by the $100 a week rent I receive on that bedroom. The paperwork is organised and easy to reference while the income on that house has gone up by $5,200 a year from a space that was poorly used.
Deal with each monthly summary statement as it comes in, whether by paper or email. Check the expenditure against your own receipts. Take any purchase receipts from your purse or wallet on a certain day each week and put them in a place where you do your finances. When your bank statement comes in simply check off the purchase receipts against the larger monthly statement. Everything should match. If you are self-employed and doing your own tax returns save each weekly envelope and date it for easy reference later. When the full tax year is done you can provide the bank statements and the receipts to your book-keeper and you keep your costs down because you are in control.
Get clear on your financial paperwork and you will naturally find yourself better able to make decisions about what to do with your assets so that they start to work for you, building your future wealth and financial freedom. The clearer you get with your finances the harder your money can work for you.
