Self-care is the practice of prioritizing your mental, physical, emotional, and social health. This means investing your time and energy into caring for your whole self.
Self-care is often equated to splurging and treating yourself to your favorite luxury or guilty pleasure. However, true self-care usually involves hard work rather than luxuries. Working out, de-stressing, self-reflection, and building healthy relationships often require intentionality and commitment.
I'd like to propose that learning to invest is an important aspect of self-care. It requires prioritizing your future goals over your immediate desires. It requires taking the time to learn about investment accounts, choosing diversified investments, managing a portfolio, handling your emotions during a market decline, balancing debt and investing, and planning for retirement. Learning these skills pays huge dividends in the long run and contributes to your overall well-being in several ways.
Physical and Mental Health
Financial concerns are stressful. Stress can negatively impact your physical and mental health, especially if you experience chronic stress. Stress and anxiety can impact nearly every system in the body, affecting cardiovascular health, endocrine function, the immune system, and more. Taking control of your finances in any form can reduce stress, whether it means learning to live below your means, creating an emergency fund, improving your credit score, or investing for future goals.
Your attitude towards finances can play a role in how you save and spend money. If you find yourself spending money mindlessly or focusing on what you don't have, you may find some of these tips and affirmations helpful. Understanding how you feel and interact with money will help you build good financial habits and will give you a solid foundation for investing.
Investing is one of the easiest ways you can increase your wealth and provide stability for your future self. Knowing that you will have enough to support yourself in retirement is one of the best gifts you can give your future self.
Nearly half of retirees stop working earlier than planned, often due to unforeseen circumstances such as health or disability of themselves or a loved one. Long-term investing for retirement is one of the best ways to be prepared for such a circumstance. Your retirement investments can bridge the gap between retiring and taking Social Security. It can also provide income to supplement social security if your balance is sufficient.
Emotional Health
Learning essential life skills can be empowering and build self-confidence. Investing can provide you with the financial freedom to make decisions you would otherwise not be able to make.
If you are financially secure, you have the freedom to pivot careers, retire early, or pursue less lucrative passions such as starting a business or traveling. Starting a llama farm or becoming a tattoo artist may be a lifelong dream you have had. Starting a business is much less stressful if you aren't depending on it to pay your mortgage. By not having to worry as much about the financial impact of such decisions, you can pursue goals that improve your quality of life.
Even if you aren't planning any changes, just knowing that work is optional can change how you feel about your current situation. If management changes and you become unhappy, you can leave. New policies don't feel quite as restrictive when you know you are choosing to stay and abide by them.
Knowledge about investing can stabilize your emotions and build confidence that you are making wise decisions about your finances. Understanding how the stock market fluctuates and its long-term trends can reduce your stress when the stock market is volatile.
If volatility is stressful for you, take note and try a few different strategies.
Consider adjusting your investments to a less risky allocation after the market recovers. Do not make emotional changes during a crash. Feeling severe anxiety during volatility means you probably need to adjust your investments that match your risk tolerance.
Focus on the wins along the way. Celebrate when you have consistently contributed to your accounts. Celebrate your first $100k. Feel awesome when you rebalance your portfolio. Pat yourself on the back when you don't panic sell during a crash.
Remember that investing is a long-term tool. You don't care about dips because you have decades. Investors nearing retirement still have decades, although it is important to prepare for sequence of returns risk. Stick to your plan.
Even if you prefer to have someone else handle your investments, knowing why and how investments work will allow you to choose someone who aligns with your investing goals. You will be able to know when they are offering genuinely useful insights and identify when their advice may not align with your best interests.
Social Health
Learning to invest can have a positive impact on your relationships. Being adequately prepared for unexpected expenses and retirement can reduce tension and stress between family members. No one likes to feel like a burden on their friends or family. Knowing that you are financially secure can allow your friends and family to focus on their own financial well-being without worrying about if you will need help when you retire.
Another important aspect of social self-care is learning to establish and enforce healthy boundaries. This skill is a good practice in any relationship but is especially necessary in regard to money. Creating boundaries will allow you to set expectations about how you handle money in your relationships with your friends and family. Boundaries are personal and may look different for each individual.
Be clear and consistent when you communicate your boundaries. Setting boundaries could look like any of the following:
Do not lend money. Give a gift if you are willing and able. Do not lend what you cannot afford to give.
Focus on the decisions and things you can control in your own life. Let go of the choices and consequences in other people's lives. Their choices and consequences are not your responsibility.
If your culture prioritizes family support, create a budget that includes this expense. Learn to firmly say no if you cannot afford to provide more support.
Refuse gifts that likely have strings attached.
Articulate when a group activity is outside of your budget and offer alternative suggestions.
Healthy boundaries will allow you to achieve your investing goals and also help you navigate your relationships in a way that allows you to avoid resentment and toxicity around finances.
Community Health
Knowing how to invest and the importance of investing can have a huge impact on individual finances. Sharing this knowledge broadly can impact entire communities.
Financial stability and generational wealth can empower communities and future generations in ways that a simple savings account cannot. While investment education cannot solve all the complex dynamics that contribute to poverty, it is an important tool to help strengthen communities and create opportunities for financial security. A rising tide lifts all ships. We all fare better when everyone in our community is safe and secure.
Investing can also allow people to have the resources to give back to their communities by donating to non-profits, charities, and community organizations that help create healthier and safer communities. While most of us will not generate wealth to seriously change the world, there is something to be said about the impact of many of us leaving the world slightly better than we found it. Your little contributions may make a big difference to someone. So find a cause you care about and be generous when you can.
Practice Self-Care Today
You can see how learning to invest can benefit your physical, mental, emotional, social, and community health. It may not be as fun as getting a massage or practicing yoga, but the benefits of investing for your future will be just as, if not more, beneficial to your self-care.
If you already know how to invest, set some simple goals for yourself to grow your investments. Commit to contributing to your IRA regularly. Or consider increasing your contribution by a small amount. Encourage a young coworker to sign up for the retirement account.
If you don't know anything about investing, you can begin your investing journey with our free investing course. You can check out our Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest pages for more helpful tools. Share your knowledge with your friends and family to build financial security and generational wealth in your community. We'll all be more healthy because of it.
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