Your Money Story #3 – The Vigilant Observer with Jessica Cannella

Money Vigilante:

Jessica Canella: Today, we are going to talk about what it might feel like if you are hyper-vigilant around your money.

Welcome back. I’m Jessica Cannella, co-founder and president of Oak Harvest Financial Group and today, we are continuing our conversation on our money stories. We talked about the spender and the saver, we had our spender who was, in no way shape or form, vigilant about her money and the saver who was terrified to spend any of his money.

Today we’re going to focus on, what does it mean to be hyper-vigilant as it relates to your finances? Strongly encourage you to be vigilant when it comes to your finances. You want to know what is going on, where your accounts are, how you’re invested, the general idea of what your cash flow looks like, your expenses, and a target date for retirement.

Let’s discuss, what it might look like if you are hyper-vigilant.

Have you ever found yourself logging into your investment accounts on a daily basis? You’re really tracking to see, are my accounts up? Are they down? Maybe you’ve got a pen and paper out and you’re calculating some math, subtracting your gains with your losses and just seeing how is your financial advisor doing, or if you’re a self-director, how are you doing? It changes your emotional state as a result of doing this drill.

If you have found yourself doing something like that, you might have a hyper-vigilant attitude around money which means you don’t want to miss a thing because you get a sense of control from very closely managing your accounts and looking at what’s going on. I strongly advise against being hyper-vigilant when it comes to your money and the reason I suggest advising against that is because when we become emotional about our money, it makes us want to take an action.

Thinking logically, it’s more about being pragmatic, and coming up with a plan and when you are able to be in a calm space, in a good, clear headspace, it’s very easy to be logical, you can clearly map out, what is the income I have coming in? The market, it does its thing, it goes up and down and you can remain level head about it. It is when emotion takes the wheel that you become at risk for taking actions that may not be logical. Being hyper-vigilant will a pave the path for you, be a bigger risk for yourself.

If you’ve ever been in your accounts, it has changed your mood, it’s a down day in the market. We’ve had several of those this year in 2022, the second half and the first half, and this month in September. The direct result of being in your accounts every day and seeing that down day, well now you are down as a result and now your decision-making process is based on the mood that you’ve created for yourself by being so hyper-vigilant and looking at things that are to some extent, beyond your control.

Maybe it looks like you go out to dinner with your wife and you’re a couple that typically likes to pick your own entrée off the menu, maybe taste each other’s but because you were tooling around in your accounts earlier in the day and you saw that they were down that now, you’re really strongly encouraging your wife that you all should split an entrée. That would be an example that might pop up for you if you are hyper-vigilant with regard to your finances.

Examine the Root Cause:

I really encourage you to think back to, what was the root cause. Maybe it was a parent or a past relationship where you felt like you had to take ownership of the finances and that looked like being very aware of what was going on and I do believe that hyper-vigilance comes back to that feeling of a lack of control as it relates to your money.

I’ve mentioned it in previous videos, what I recommend if you are identifying with some of what I’m saying here today about the hyper-vigilant attitude toward money, is that you get out a pen and a piece of paper and you start to write down root causes from your past of where that might have stemmed from and generally guys, it is from your childhood.

You can have money stories that evolve over time into your teenage years, your college years, young adult, and so on and so forth, but your formative years are from ages five to seven, so really dig deep and think about some of the attitudes around money in your own house growing up and jot down a couple of notes about what you think you’re making that connection.

Once you can make the connection and have some self-awareness, that then creates the path to be able to rewrite some of that framework and it’s powerful. Thank you so much for joining me in this series and I look forward to continuing the conversation with you in the future. If you’ve liked our video series, please click the like button and don’t forget to subscribe.