Money Moment Anxiety - How To Beat It

I recently interviewed Mark Nagle, Executive Director of Treysta Wealth on my Get To The Contest Podcast about our relationships with money, the concept of money moments, and how individuals and business owners can manage the impacts money moments can have on our personal and business lives.

With everything we do in life, money touches us in some way, shape, or form, both positively and negatively. Here are some takeaways from my chat with Mark.

What is a Money Moment?

Money touches our lives many times daily, and sometimes, it’s a fleeting moment. The impact of that moment may not appear great at the time. An example of a fleeting money moment might overspend on a night out. You wake up the next day and you feel a little pang of guilt but you quickly move on with your day with little thought about it. Other Money moments in our life are much bigger such as inheritance, divorce, private school fees, or retirement. These are all big, big money moments, and most people certainly have a great sense of uncertainty around those things, and often anxiety, and that causes a very detrimental to general wellbeing.

Is it just when money is going out that it causes anxiety?

No, sometimes the money moments that cause us the most anxiety is when we can into it unexpectedly, like an inheritance. How many stories have we all read about lottery winners where things have gone wrong? It's not a silver bullet for a fantastic life. It certainly can be. But we've all read stories where people have won the lottery and it's led to misery, and family breakups and goodness knows what else. There's anxiety about having money. So, people worry about money that they have as well as worrying money about that they don't have.

How can we manage this “money moment anxiety”?

Try and take away the uncertainty and the anxiety and replace that, through good advice, with confidence and calm. A good way to do this is to put in place a decision-making process when it comes to money. A structure that helps you minimise the worry of the unknown.

In my chat with Mark, he provided the following example:

So, a client came along, and it was one of those moments that anybody with young children that thinks they cost them quite a lot of money, just you wait until their adults. The money that they ask for just gets bigger. It doesn't stop. She called me up and said look, her daughter who's in a relationship, they kind of decided that they want to buy a house and buy their first house, and it was a case of, "Mum, is there any chance that you and Dad could help us out with the deposit?" Now, of course, a lot of parents seek to do that. It's an objective that a lot of us have is to help our kids, particularly with the crazy property market that we have in Australia now, or particularly the Sydney area. So, the anxiety, and the uncertainty creeps in immediately. It's can I afford to lend her any money, and if we do, how much can we afford to lend her. We really want to do this, but we don't want to send ourselves broke during retirement so how do we understand what that looks like.

And then, once you kind of go through that, it's whilst we don't expect her to pay us back, what happens if that relationship breaks up in a year's time or two years’ time, does that money that we've gifted my daughter suddenly get divided between the two of them, and the now ex-boyfriend runs off into the distance with a part of our family's cash.

So, as you can imagine, that set of circumstances very quickly leads to anxiety and uncertainty.

There's a framework that you can work through to start helping people go through those decisions. In this case, were very quickly able to help her understand the kind of money that she could think about gifting to her daughter without causing any disruption to her financial wellbeing and her and her husband's retirement, and we were also able to suggest that there is the option that she could put a loan document in place. And so, rather than just gifting the child money, you put a loan document in place. So, if there's a breakup down the track, if you threw $50,000 into the deal, that $50,000 comes back to repay that loan prior to any split of the asset down the track.

This is a great example of how a decision-making structure will not only give you confidence when dealing with these money moments but manage the anxiety that comes along with them. This decision-making framework helps people through what can be otherwise quite difficult situations.

Who can you speak to about creating a better relationship with money?

When it comes to money the most important thing is, to be honest with yourself and don’t overestimate your abilities or the abilities of your mates at a BBQ. When it comes to complex money moments and creating an effective decision-making structure it is important that you have a trusted adviser that can help. Depending on the nature of the money moment this could be a Financial Adviser, Real Estate Agent, Mortgage Broker, Lawyer, or Accountant. A big part of my role as an Accountant is to help my clients make the right decision in these money moments. Many, many years working with clients and their money moments has given me the tools to help my clients with both the fleeting and big money moments. Your Accountant or Adviser should understand these situations far beyond the tax impact or the rate of return, they should understand the uncertainty and anxiety that the money moment is causing and work with the client to ease the anxiety by helping make confident and measured decisions.

If you want to hear the entirety of my chat with mark about money moments and other things, you can listen here - Money Moments with Mark Nagle (buzzsprout.com)

To contact one of our experienced Business Advisers please call us on (02) 4353 3889