Feel Money freedom with one little shift
My car got a puncture last week and when I went to the garage for a new tyre, I found out two others needing replacing which left me £350 the poorer!!!
Unexpected costs used to leave me really annoyed and could easily ruin my day (or week).
Like when I went over the Liverpool toll bridge and had until midnight to pay the toll but I forgot and so ended up with a fine. More potential for annoyance.
I am always looking for little tips that boost my joy and happiness so was excited to learn a little trick from the swedish thinker Rolf Dobelli called ‘Mental Accounting’ which has left me feeling calm and contented instead of irritable and annoyed when I lose money.
His insight is that we don’t treat all money the same — we feel different according to where the money has come from and our expectations of it.
For example, if you find £100 you are more likely to spend it on something trivial than if you earnt the £100. You see that money differently and feel differently about it.
The £350 for my new tyres has the potential to wind me up because that money was meant for something else, such as my enjoyment or savings. But what happens if I already have £500 in a car repair fund? I will tend to feel less annoyance because the £350 is coming from the car repair pot rather than the ‘buy me something nice pot’.
The same can happen with the Liverpool toll bridge fine. That comes out of my ‘donations to organisations’ pot (as do speeding fines, bank charges and parking tickets). And this makes a massive difference to how I react when these potential irritations occur.
You can allocate these ‘pots’ in your budget but it can also work to just mentally allocate them in the moment to a different pot and shift your expectations. Try it next time the unexpected happens. It can work wonders.
And if you want to think a little more deeply — you might want to ask yourself why those bits of money matter so much in the first place.
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