Welcome to Lesson 2 of Financial Sobriety School.

This lesson I wanted to tell my story. I have told my story before but what's really beautiful this time when I tell my story is that my story has come full circle, for now. What I mean by that is, I have come from a place of being close to bankruptcy close, losing my home, close to losing everything. 

I've been working on my financial sobriety now for over five years. When I say working, I literally mean working on my financial sobriety, to get to a place where I was able to pay off my credit cards. As you'll read in my story today, it took a long time to do that, because the addiction to spending money was so, so strong and I accumulated a lot of debt.

I'm going to start my story when I was just a wee baby. My parents were babies raising babies back in the day. My mom was pregnant with me at 15 and my dad was 18. My mom was 16, when she gave birth to me. SO YOUNG! When I think about that statistic in general all I can say is...

I am so excited to announce

the launch of Financial Sobriety School!  

My mission is, is to help people stop overspending stop impulse spending stop addictively spending money on stuff that they don't need, and starting to build daily habits, starting to build systems, and being able to come to a place where you're making clear sober decisions with your money. This is Financial Sobriety.

One of the key foundations is sober spending. And what does that look like? What I think sober spending is, is making clear, aligned, conscious decisions. My story is that I was completely addicted to spending money. And I was obsessed with being able to buy things. I thought credit cards were my money, I thought that the limit on my credit card was permission to buy whatever I wanted and I had no consciousness about it. I just went for it. And I know that there's a lot of us out there who struggle with the addiction of spending money, the obsession, the impulses, the compulsion to spend money...

Have you been waiting for tomorrow to stop a certain habit you have with money?

Overspending

Charging everything on a credit card but can’t afford to pay it off

Avoiding looking at our money (online banking, statements, bills)

Eating out too much

Mindlessly spending

Amazon orders

Impulse purchases

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

Numbing out on online shopping

 And soooooooo many more! Did any of these resonate with you?

Journaling prompt: What habits are no longer serving you with money?

In a perfect world we would feel ready. Sometimes we just need to take one small step.

When I first started working with my money, I did not feel ready. It felt like one of those things that I just needed to get going on because I just kept saying “tomorrow I will deal with it”.

Tomorrow never came but my excuses and avoidance did, every single day.

I avoided money for so long. The main thing that I was avoiding was my debt. I just kept spending and...

Ok, I know what you are thinking. What is a spending plan? It is a term I use instead of saying budget. I don’t love the word budget as it feels kinda icky to me. It feels like a term I used to use when I tried to get my money figured out and I always failed at it.  If you love the word budget, please use it! I want you to use the term that works best for you.

Term’s like, “it’s not in my budget”, “just did my budget and I won’t have any money this month”, “we can’t afford that, it’s not in the budget” were things I sometimes heard growing up and even said myself as an adult.

I like to refer to it as a spending plan because my thinking has turned around to “I get to CHOOSE what I spend my money on”, as opposed to “My budget is so depressing, I have to spend too much money”. Sometimes the difference in how we perceive things can make such a HUGE difference.

First and foremost,...

Overspending is defined as spending more money than you can afford.

Does this sound familiar?

You are not alone. I used to be addicted to spending money. I was an overspender.

Would be in the midst of doing something and something would come to mind that I thought I “needed”, I looked it up online, one click I would buy it and wouldn’t even care when it showed up on my doorstep.

Would be having a bad day, feeling stressed, sad and I would find myself driving to my favourite store and buying things to make me feel better.

Would be having a great day, happy and I would find myself driving to a store to celebrate how I was feeling.

The list goes on and on about how I found myself pulling out my credit card to change how I was feeling. It worked, but only for a moment. I would get the dopamine hit. It was lovely. Then it left and I wanted more.

I would get a statements from the credit cards I used and often would have to take from a retirement account to pay the...