Chelsea breaks down the common money decisions we all make that are about building our financial futures, and which should never be sources of shame. Looking to boost your money habits? Check out this video:
Hey guys it’s chelsea from the financial diet and this week’s video is brought to you by dash line and this week we’re gonna talk about many of the financial decisions that maybe you have already made you are currently making or you may have to make one day these are all really common situations and decisions that we find ourselves in that are the right choices
For us but which we feel embarrassed about for so many of us one of the biggest obstacles to getting healthy with money is the feeling of shame that we might have around making the decisions that we need to make just simply being on a budget can make people feel really awkward around their friends having to say no to something or not being okay with splitting the
Bill when you got just an entree and they got entree appetizer drinks dessert it can put you in a position of having to feel like you need to apologize for wanting to do what’s right for you and while of course the bigger point is that anyone who would make you feel badly about wanting to save money isn’t really a friend it’s also just a reality that we have to
Learn to be confident in these decisions and not put our value and self-worth and what other people think about them if the decision is what is right for you financially then it’s right period you don’t have to apologize and you especially don’t have to be ashamed but i think it’s always worth talking about honestly and reminding ourselves of so without further
Ado eight financial decisions you should never be ashamed of number one is living with your parents now living with your parents is something that i think a lot of us have a fraught relationship with even if we have a great relationship with our parents i personally lived with my parents for a few years after high school and i recall how embarrassed i felt that
I wasn’t going off to some fancy college and living my young adult life it doesn’t help that i was a total brat who was a huge pain in the ass to my parents but even for people who aren’t pains in the ass it can be just a really awkward experience of you being an adult and then still kind of de-facto treating you as a kid because you’re their kid and it can be
Something that others easily look at as some kind of a failure but something important to remember about living with your parents is that for many of us if it is available it can be the difference between following your dreams or achieving some huge goal and not being able to do either of those things for example lauren my co-founder here at tf d lived with her
Parents until she was 25 in order to be able to co-found the company with me because obviously that meant going without money for while we recently published a video on our making it work series about a young woman who was able to save fifty thousand dollars by the age of 25 working on a pretty low hourly wage and a big part of that was because she lived with
Her parents and while there are definitely ways to make the whole living with your parents as an adult thing easier logistically for example working out an arrangement with them where you contribute financially to the household so you don’t just feel like a freeloader and get treated as one it really doesn’t matter what other people think about it and the sense
Of shame that we have around living with our parents is almost entirely based on how others are going to perceive it remember that being able to move in with your parents is a luxury for so many reasons it implies that you have a good enough relationship with your parents that they have enough space and bandwidth to take you in and that you even have parents if
This is something available to you and you need it to help to get you where you need to go take advantage of it and feel lucky that you have it don’t spend one minute feeling ashamed of something that’s going to help you build your future on a similar note number two is living with roommates now i live in new york city and specifically manhattan which is probably
The island in which it is most socially acceptable to be living with roommates essentially until you die it’s an incredibly expensive city and if you ever dreamed of things like a closet that was bigger than a shoebox or perhaps even two toilets in a home the luxury chances are you’re going to be married or you’re probably going to be living with a roommate hell
Maybe you’ll just marry your roommate to get some of that health insurance the point is in new york city it’s pretty normalized and people don’t bat an eyelash at people living with roommates well into adulthood but in other places in the country it’s less well observed but here’s the truth living with roommates is often the perfect solution to wanting to put your
Money elsewhere besides just throwing it on rent or for example if you happen to own a place it’s a great way to offset those mortgage costs the point is that a huge financial trap that people tend to fall into is paying way too much on their day-to-day living costs some people end up paying 50% of their take-home pay on rent and that’s including when they live
With roommates and yes having a home that is beautiful and cozy and maybe even spacious is a nice thing to have but it shouldn’t come at the cost of every other financial goal you have and especially when you’re renting everything that you can do to minimize that cost in the short term without totally sacrificing quality of life is a good decision as i mentioned
Even with roommates in cities like new york it is easy for the cost of just paying for your home to spiral in comparison to the rest of your budget and if living with roommates allows you to have a home that you enjoy without paying full price for it go for it my biggest piece of advice though would be to make damn sure you are happy with the roommate that you’re
Going to be living with because nothing is worse than a bad roommate situation number three is working a non career job as i’ve mentioned before on tfd almost nothing pisses me off more than the insinuations that certain jobs are not real jobs usually because they don’t involve you sitting at a desk slowly getting back injuries over the course of 40 years there is
An implication that there is certain work that is worthy of an adult’s time and certain work that isn’t and everyone seems to have a conveniently different definition on what real work is and isn’t but here is one of the biggest takeaways that i hope people get from watching this channel all work is real work and on that same note all paychecks are real paychecks
Whether you are working a temporary job until you get that nine-to-five that you are so dreaming about or you are working a job that doesn’t fit at all into the nine-to-five because it’s what allows you to live the life you want to live or you’re doing something in the middle because you don’t know what you want to do yet any job that you are working is worthy of
Your time and no job is beneath you and while this isn’t a hard and fast rule because relationships are more complicated something to keep in mind is that if someone makes you feel badly about the job you’re doing you should really reconsider their place in your life i remember when i was 22 and i was working as an au pair that many people in my life were pretty
Judgmental because they were all leaving college and going off to those real jobs where they sat at a desk all day and i remember feeling incredibly envious of those jobs even though my work as an au pair allowed me to freelance right to go to school and to live in france full-time i should have been thrilled about the opportunities and life that that job provided
Me but i felt really ashamed that i wasn’t entering the real workforce like those people and looking back every single one of those people who was an about me being an au pair are people who aren’t in my life anymore and it’s not like i did some scorched earth thing where i was like all of you are banished forever from my life but i just realized like hey there’s
Literally no reason for me to feel self-conscious about this and if someone else is making me feel that way they’re probably not a good friend the point is the choice you are making is the choice that works for you right now it’s no one else’s business and anyone who has anything other than supportive of the professional choices you are making with a clear head
Should have a big old question mark after their name number four is using hand-me-down home goods now i’m 30 and i love home stuff i love home decor i love cooking i love being in my home and i can tell you that at 30 a very large proportion of items in my home are hand-me-downs thrifted or ikea even if i had the money to replace all of this stuff with new more
Upscale branded things and i don’t i wouldn’t be doing that because the stuff that i have works just fine only as of like two weeks ago did i replace the ikea extendable dining table that i’ve been using for like five years despite it being half broken and not suited to my dining nook and it’s only because i replaced it with a dining table my mom was getting rid of
Nice quality furniture and kitchen supplies can be hundreds and even thousands of dollars and i simply can’t afford to stock my home with nothing but nice new brand-name things and beyond that things like dining ware and basic furniture are some of the best stuff to get either handed down or from a thrift shop flea market or garage sale especially if like me you
Love to follow beautiful decor blogs and instagrams and food bloggers it can be really easy to feel inadequate about the stuff that you have in your home or feel like having a bunch of hand-me-downs or secondhand or ikea makes you a little bit less of an adult but nothing could be further from the truth and more importantly having that little mix match imperfect
Pastiche style is very chic even for an adult who’s been collecting stuff for decades never feel ashamed of your ikea number five is sometimes shopping fast fashion now this is a complicated one because there are real ethical issues with most fast fashion brands their practices are not sustainable they’re not good for the environment and they’re not good for the
People who work for these companies but as tfd columnist shamar lawrence wrote in a recent piece completely for going fast fashion is a privilege it means that you are either able to get all things that you need at higher end stores or wait around for the right sales or get really lucky at discount in thrift shops sometimes we’re in a place where we need to buy
That $5.00 shirts so we can go to work or we can’t afford to go to a nice shoe store and have to grab our summer sandals for like 10 bucks there’s a difference between making a goal to do the least fast fashion shopping that you can and feeling like a terrible person because sometimes you have to use it we have to remember that most of the longer term sustainable
Consumer choices we’re going to make in life are things that we’re going to make slowly and they will become easier as we become more financially flexible my first office wardrobe was entirely built at h&m in forever 21 and of course i don’t think that it was great that i had to do it there but it’s all the money i had and i didn’t have time to wait for things
To go on sale at better stores i can make different choices now without berating myself for the choices i had to make then and if some of your closet is a little bit more fast fashion than you would like keep in mind that you can slowly work your way to a closet without it without feeling ashamed number 6 is googling money statistics to make yourself feel less
Alone now this one maybe is a little bit dark but it’s something that i think is so important to talk about at tfd we make it a real point to remind you guys some of the more shocking statistics about american financial life like the fact that about half of americans couldn’t cover an unexpected $400 emergency or the fact that the average bachelor’s degree holder
Is about $38,000 in debt or that about 75% of americans live paycheck to paycheck these are shocking statistics and indicative of a system that needs to be changed but in the mean time if you sometimes look at numbers like this intentionally because it makes you feel more normal that’s a good thing we can carry so much shame with us about things like debt or bad
Credit scores or not having enough in our bank accounts or feel like we’re falling behind because we only have $1,000 in the bank and not even realize that that’s more than a lot of americans have there’s a difference between becoming complacent about your financial life and putting it in perspective enough to realize that you don’t have to be ashamed that you’re
More than norm than the exception and that if things feel hard for you it’s because they’re hard for a lot of us if you’ve ever found yourself in a place where you’re looking for other people who are in as bad or worse of a situation than you are you’re normal and i hope that places like tfd can always be the kind of place where you can come to feel like hey a lot
Of us are in this boat i now have a pretty good credit score but it used to be almost literally as low as a credit score can be i wasn’t even qualified to get a really shitty cellphone plan and i used to use check cashing services to get my money from my paychecks and i used to be an expert at dodging collection calls i know how all of these things feel and i know
How ashamed you can be of feeling them but there’s no shame in wanting to feel normal and if you’re having a little bit of trouble financially that makes you normal number 7 is side hustling there can be a lot of stigma around side hustling this idea that there’s somehow shame to be had in working a little bit after hours to make ends meet or to reach stretch goals
And of course it can feel a little bit embarrassing or awkward when you have to say no to the friends night out because you’re babysitting or tutoring or whatever else you’re doing but that perception that taking on extra work is because you absolutely need the money is ridiculous because it’s true everyone needs more money everyone could put extra money to some
Good use and even if you’re not just scraping by there are always goals that are above and beyond the bare minimum and it doesn’t even have to be really mature things like wanting to invest more or beef up your emergency fund it can be simply to go on a better vacation than you normally do or buy a really nice coat the point is there are endless reasons why you
Might be working side gigs i worked them endlessly for the first two years of starting tfd taking on all the extra work i could get because it allowed me to do this project that was so important to me and i couldn’t be more glad that i did just like the stigma around not working a real job this stigma around working extra hours on the side is all about making
Small people feel better that they made the right choice but everyone’s choice is unique and it can be pretty tough to get ahead financially so if you’re doing what you need to do in order to get there never feel ashamed number eight is accepting financial help now this is a complicated one because it obviously inherently involves some privilege but if you’re in
Need of financial help and someone offers it to you you should take it now of course you have to make sure you’re setting the right terms for the and the right expectations but you should never feel ashamed about accepting help where you need it because that’s how all of us get by in a real functioning society where we’re woven together and not all on some individual
Island with like guns and a survivalist kit fighting each other i had friends and relatives who’ve loaned me money throughout my life when i needed it and i’ve loaned friends money when they needed it now of course my biggest piece of advice is when you are loaning money to a friend or family member always be able to think of it in your mind as a gift because they
May not be able to pay it back or pay it back as quickly as you want them to and that tension can really destroy a relationship in all of my cases the money was paid back but what made it easiest in those situations was that the lender was not shaming the person being lended – there can be almost nothing more difficult than asking for a bit of financial help but
One of the marks of a truly close relationship is someone who will not judge you for that even if they can’t say yes because they don’t have the ability to lend it at that moment having a relationship with someone where you know you could go to them and you wouldn’t be judged is the mark of a truly special relationship and remember that most of us have times when we
Could use a little bit of help and there’s no point in feeling ashamed when it’s your time the goal should be to work to a place where you one day could be of help to someone else and do it in a way that makes them feel unashamed and cared for and one thing you should never be ashamed of is protecting what’s important so start protecting your passwords with – lane
– Lane is a password manager app that will make your life infinitely easier and safer – lane generates secure passwords for you so you don’t have to worry about remembering every password that has a number symbol or capitalized letter it’ll create the safest password possible and remember it for you it has patented security architecture which encrypts everything
So that no one but you can see your information and if a breach ever does happen you’ll be immediately alerted and notified if you reuse the breach password anywhere else go to the link in our description – ling comm slash tfd to get a 30-day free trial of dashlane and you can use the coupon code tfd to upgrade to premium if you like it with a 10% discount and
Premiums great because it allows you to sync your passwords across all your devices meaning if you get a new phone or laptop you can just install dashlane and have all your passwords ready to go for your digital life so as always guys thanks for watching and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and to come back every tuesday thursday and friday for new and awesome videos bye you
Transcribed from video
8 Financial Decisions You Should Never Be Ashamed Of | The Financial Diet By The Financial Diet
