All of us have a distinct financial personality or what we call our “Money Pulse”, that is probably different than anyone else’s. What you do or don’t do with your money in tough times says a lot about your core financial beliefs. Often we get caught up in a herd mentality and we gravitate toward what others are doing. Consider Bernie Madoff and the famous people who invested millions without asking fundamental questions. An economic crisis is not a time to follow the crowd…it’s a time to know yourself extremely well.
Monthly Archive for April, 2009
According to the 2008 American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey, money is often on the minds of most Americans. In fact, the results revealed that money and the state of the economy are two of the top sources of stress for 80 percent of Americans. And symptomatically, one third of Americans reported losing sleep over the economy and personal finance concerns, according to a recent poll by the National Sleep Foundation.
Know that we have a problem and understanding what to do about it are miles apart… and even further removed can be actually changing our behavior.
Turns out April is “Financial Literacy Month” and the National Foundation for Credit Counseling is weighing in by releasing the initial results of their third annual Financial Literacy survey. As this is currently a hot topic nationally, Congress will be briefed with the full report later this month. They will hear, among other alarming statistics, that fully 41% of respondents gave themselves a grade of either “C, D or F” when it comes to understanding money and/or making good money decisions. We are definitely not making the Dean’s List here.
Last week, I mentioned that two of the clear differences between our current economic crisis and the Great Depression are the interactive ways we now communicate and the staggering amount of data that is literally at our fingertips via the Web. Collectively these phenomena contribute to what I termed the, “data invasion”, meaning that, unless we have a way to filter, simplify, and personalize financial information we will probably not be much better off than they were in the 30′s… sort of dazed and confused.