Although it isn’t inherently associated with finances, stress often times arises from dealing with your personal financial issues, regardless of if you’re in a good financial situation or not.

In regards to finance, there are (in my opinion) good forms of stress and bad forms of stress. Most people tend to only see the bad forms of stress - this stress often discourages them from even dealing with their finances, which is a place that you don’t want to be - and a place I’ll touch on later this week. What causes stress? Things called stressors are basically the things in ones life that influence the level and frequency of stress. In order to manage stress, it’s important to manage these stressors effectively - and in order to do that, they must be identified.

Things that stress people out negatively vary drastically from person to person. If I were standing in a crowd, the person to my right might be fine with having credit card debt and paying relatively high interest rates on the cards, while the person to my right may think that credit cards are the worst thing available, and I lie somewhere in the middle. Something that doesn’t stress out one person is causing some people to rip out their hair. Because of the dynamic nature of stressors amongst a large group of people, everybody has to identify what they personally get stressed about. Credit card debts, working 9-5 for ‘the man’, whatever; write down anything that causes stress and is somehow related to finances. My big one is working 35 hours for ‘the man’ for close to minimum wage and feeling like I’m not making any progress. Being a college student, it’s something that I’ve been conditioned to live with, but I’m not satisfied with mediocrity.

Once you have a list compiled, arrange them by how simple they are to solve. Working 9-5 for somebody else, for example, probably ranks pretty low on the list - it’s quite difficult for most people to quit their job and still maintain their standard of living. On the other hand, if something that causes you stress is your credit card bills - or just managing your spending - chances are it’s easier to solve problems like this. Once you have the list arrange, start at the top and work your way down, eliminating them completely or figuring out a way to deal with them.  If your credit card bills are causing you a headache month after month, start paying down more to get rid of the debt quicker. Cut expenses (something I’ll get into later) if you don’t have the extra cash easily. If you’re like me and don’t want to be stuck in a 9-5 for 40+ years, find something that you like to do and learn how to make money from it; you won’t be sick of doing it and it’ll help you accomplish your goals.  The important thing to know is that when you’re tackling this list, it’s simply going to be impossible to knock off all of these peeves, at least quickly. Patience is a must, as is persistence. If you continue to make small changes that will help reduce your stress, you will be happily surprised over time.

Eliminating all stress isn’t necessarily a good thing, at least not for all people. It depends on how you operate, but I personally thrive off some level of stress. I’m a full-time college student and a full-time employee for a retail electronics store. I have about two hours each day where I can manage to sit down and relax, but it’s this hustle and bustle that keeps me going. Good stressors in my life, when it comes to my finances, include working full time. Being employed keeps me active and, I hate to say it, provides a ‘reliable’ source of income. I hate to say it because I wish I didn’t have to rely on trading my time for my money, but as of right now my options are somewhat limited. Being employed keeps me active in my own life, trying to change how I’m making my money and how I’m spending my time. By being stressed from my working situation, I am more motivated to make changes and find a ‘way out’.

Using seemingly negative stressors in a positive way can be a huge motivator. Above all, remember that everything will take time to change. Almost nothing can be changed immediately. Being able to cope with the stress in the meantime and being able to deal with the time it takes to change things is what makes or breaks people; it’s what keeps some people biting their fingernails and it keeps other people looking for alternatives to their current situation. The important thing to remember is that we all have a choice with how we deal with stress. Don’t bite your fingernails.

Financial goals are important for people to have, as it helps them gauge a lot of things - like when they can afford to retire, for example. A big problem I’ve noticed is that many people don’t know how to set good financial goals, and many people don’t know how to properly track their progress once they do set their goals. I’ll briefly attempt to tackle this problem, with a few things that have worked for me.

One of the hardest parts of setting goals is, well, setting them. I know it sounds a bit obvious, and it is; unfortunately, it doesn’t make it any easier.When I started setting my financial goals, I realized that the hardest thing was figuring out where I wanted to be, and when I wanted to be there. I had to take many different factors into consideration, including how I was going to accomplish my goals. I have a long-term goal of retiring by the age of 45, but in order to do that I need to achieve a lot of smaller financial goals. Saying that I wanted to be retired by 45 wasn’t enough just by itself; in order to make that goal actually mean something, actually feel attainable, I needed to make smaller goals, or benchmarks, to help accomplish that.

Figuring out what is attainable depends on your own personal lifestyle and income, among other things. I live a fairly frugal life; as a general rule, I don’t spend money on something unless I genuinely need it. Somebody who lives a different lifestyle than me - somebody who lives in a nicer apartment or house, somebody who drives a nicer car, or has ‘nicer stuff’ than I do, will likely not have the same type of goals I do. For somebody who ’splurges’ on these types of things, retirement at 45 may be unattainable.

Making smaller goals is essential to accomplish your bigger goals. So you want to be able to purchase a house in 5 years? Depending on your current situation, you may need to make other goals; develop a more vigorous savings plan for a down payment, clean up your credit and remove as many debts as possible, etc. Something I do before I set goals is to estimate how much it will take to achieve my goal. If I want to be able to purchase a house in four years, after I have found a job and generally know where I’m going to be living, I need to figure out what kind of a budget I’ll need, then how much I need to save each year up until then.

Smaller goals also make the bigger goal seem less daunting. If I were to make a goal of buying a house in 5 years, but didn’t have smaller goals to help me work my way toward it, I may get sidetracked and discouraged. By making small goals, like checkpoints for along the way, I’m helping my overall cause by tracking my progress and also am encouraging myself by accomplishing other goals along the way. The final result doesn’t seem as difficult when it’s broken up into smaller parts. These smaller parts also help keep me on track and let me make any adjustments if necessary; if I find that I’m not saving enough money, I can make a conscious effort to cut down my expenses or increase my income somehow in order to get back up to speed. If I’m cruising along much quicker than expected, I can either continue the cruise, the the ‘extra’ money away/invest it in something else, or maybe splurge just a little if I think it’s something I’ll be able to realistically cope with.

Goals also need to be challenging. For me, buying a house in four years seems like a very difficult task. I’ve still got two more years of college, and my expenses after college will go up considerably. My income will rise as well, but these may not be proportionate. By giving myself something that I really need to work for in order to achieve, it makes that final result feel much better. I know that I’ve accomplished something that actually required a change in me, a constant commitment.

Commitment is another thing that can make or break goals. I’ve got a list of goals that I’d like to accomplish, and I have this list tacked to my wall in two different locations. When I started these goals a month and a half ago, I looked at them every day just to remind myself of what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to do it. Now that I’m a month and a half in, I don’t feel the need to look at them every day. Trent over at The Simple Dollar made a great point about his personal finance management - he related it to training wheels. My sheet of goals has turned into just training wheels. I know what I have to do now to reach my goals, but I can always put my training wheels back on - look at my goals - if I need a bit of extra help remembering. By ingraining this into my daily routine, I don’t even think about these things anymore. What was a chore at the beginning of the year is now scheduled into my day, is so solidly with me that I have a hard time doing otherwise.

Measuring your progress is a crucial part of reaching your financial goals, but more important than measuring your progress is how you handle your progress if you aren’t where you really want to be. It’s easy to get discouraged, it’s easy to become pessimistic about your financial goals. It’s easy to become pessimistic about money in general - I can’t even begin to describe to you how many people don’t want to talk about finances for one reason or another - they don’t understand it, or they’re struggling financially, or think that talking about finances is bad. By shutting out financial discussions, these people are basically condemning themselves to 45 years of working 9 - 5 five days a week. They’re extending the amount of time they have to spend working a job they probably want to leave early, just by neglecting discussion of how they can better their situation. Goals work the same way. If you get down about failures you make along the way, it’s important to keep on trudging along no matter what. There are some goals that I’ve made for the year ahead that I know I will likely not accomplish; but instead of looking the other way and ignoring them, I am taking action to rectify the situation or at least get a plan in motion for how I can fix it next year. Pessimism, as cliche as it sounds, kills dreams. By keeping a positive attitude, you won’t lose sight of the final result and you’ll do what needs to be done to get there.

When you finally do reach your financial goals, you should reward yourself somehow. For me wanting to buy a house of my own, that is reward enough; having the sense of pride that homeowners have. Some people might want to take a vacation, buy a new TV, or just take a few days off work to relax. Whatever it is that will make you strive more for your financial goal, make it done - you’ll find that you are more likely to work harder toward reaching that point. Setting up checkpoints - or smaller goals - along the way can be a great way of rewarding yourself for your progress so far. Whatever happens, just make sure you keep your eyes on the final goal you’ve set for yourself, and as long as you work toward that goal you have a good shot at reaching it, maybe before you had planned.

Something that is largely overlooked its time management and the implications of good time management versus poor time management. Obviously there is a finite amount of time in each day, so the trick is to maximize your productive time and minimize your unproductive time. For a lot of people, all of their extra time involves sitting around watching television or engaging in something else that is unproductive. In order to begin the process of managing your time wisely, it’s important that you identify what is important to you and what is unimportant to you.

For some people, spending time with family is important. For others with no family, or no family around, perhaps it doesn’t play as large a role. I personally fall into the second category: I have no family that is nearby and so I have virtually no time devoted to family besides an occasional phone call or weekend visit (which happened this weekend). This leaves me with a lot more time to devote to things like furthering my education, engaging in social activities, and investing my time in developing skills that can push me further towards my goals.

Things that are unimportant to me include things that will not better me or push me towards my goals. This means mindless tasks like watching most television, movies, drinking for the sake of getting drunk, and other things that yield me nothing. I value my time very highly and so I try to spend as little time as possible doing mindless things. That being said, I still am human and need a mental rest every now and then, and so I will spend an hour every few days watching TV or browsing the Internet even if it’s not really helping me.

Now that I’ve identified what’s important to me (bettering myself and moving towards my goals) and what’s not important to me (mindless activities and things that hinder me from accomplishing my goals), it’s time to start thinking about how to break up my day so that I maximize my available time by cutting out the unimportant. I’ve been criticized by my peers for making every morning an “early” one (I say “early” because in college, anything before 9am is considered early), but I find that since I took the steps to make my mornings more productive, I can make my evenings more enjoyable and overall I’m in a better position. I wake up each morning by 6:45 and start my day, eating breakfast and then going to class until 1:00pm every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I have no class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but still wake up at 6:45 regardless of what time I have to work, if at all, because I can be far more productive when I’m not distracted by my roommates and friends.

One of my most difficult goals is to be able to retire by the time I am 45 - something that’s relatively unheard of for most people. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I usually spend about an hour or so reading the news to see what is going on in the business world. This helps me gain a general oversight of what is popular, and it gives me a better general understanding of how the business world is working. I usually then devote some time, either before or after work depending on when I work, to updating my blog and brainstorming ways that I can maximize my spare time and money in the future. Some may see this as generally unproductive, but I’m confident that it’s a worthwhile investment; sometimes I will use this time to read or do homework as needed.

My days are largely sporadic because I’ve got a part-time job without set hours each week; so each week is different. It’s hard to plan my days then until I know when I am supposed to work. But, the latest I work is 8:00pm (retail) which still leaves me a few hours before I go to bed for the night. In this time I read, update my blog if I haven’t found time to earlier in the day, finish any homework I may have, and continue to find ways to move myself towards accomplishing my goals.

By managing my time wisely for the past month, I’ve noticed that I’m far more productive, find myself being bored less of the time, and am happier and healthier. I get a good night of sleep every night, even if I’m only devoting seven hours or less, and in the mornings I usually wake up feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the day at hand. Pick out the important things in your life and emphasize those when thinking about how to maximize your time. I suggest waking up early to accomplish things that may otherwise go undone in the day. Avoiding distractions helps you be more productive and being more productive helps you accomplish the things in life that truly matter to you. Don’t let anybody dictate how you spend your time; my friends think I should spend my time drinking and enjoying “college life”, but I know that through good time management I can enjoy college life without drinking and still accomplish what is important to me. The only thing keeping you from accomplishing your goals is how you spend your time. Master your time, and you can master almost everything else you want.