Are you being wise with how you manage your money?
Virtues can help guide your life and relationship with money. Greek philosopher Aristotle and theology uphold virtues as having a habitual and firm disposition to do good. Prudence, a virtue, is the ability to discipline yourself through reason. It can be associated with wisdom, insight, and knowledge.
Here are three steps to evaluate if you’re being financially prudent.
This process was adopted from this definition of prudence.
1. Seek guidance
Look within yourself and take counsel from others on how you’re handling finances. It’s easy to ignore money. To be prudent financially, be honest with yourself and where you stand. Are you living paycheck to paycheck? Are you on track to pay off student loans in 20 years and feel helpless? Have you started investing yet? If not, here’s three reasons that could be holding you back from starting. Do you have a major purchase, like buying a home coming up, but you don’t understand how mortgages work?
Talk to friends, family, and check your gut. Is finance an ongoing source of stress and anxiety? Here are signs if you have a love or hate relationship with money.
2. Make a judgement
After looking inside, yourself and getting guidance from people you trust, then make a judgement based on the evidence. If you feel at peace financially, then great! Keep doing what you are doing. Or, if you determined that finance is a problem area then decide how to gain wisdom, insight, and knowledge about finances. Make a judgement and decision to be debt-free, invest, have an emergency fund, save for a home, etc.
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3. Take Action
To be financially prudent the last step is to change your actions based on the judgement you made. As the saying goes, if nothing changes, nothing changes. If you want new results with your money, then change how you are managing money. It can be overwhelming to take actions and it’s hard to know where to start. To act, you can just take the next best logical next step. For example, if you want to get out of credit card debt, then stop using your card and adding debt. If you need help taking action, then get started with The Ultimate Guide to Managing Money. It’s a free downloadable guide with a step-by-step plan to investing, getting out of debt, saving for emergencies, and buying a home or car. Get your free guide here!
Live a virtuous life. Be financially prudent by seeking guidance, make a judgement, and take action!
