Thomas Frank from College Geek Info joins us to discuss mindfulness and how it relates to our life goals whether they are financial or adventure related.

It’s easy to dismiss mindfulness as some kind of woo-woo new age non-sense, but it’s not all navel-gazing and chakras. But when we are mindful of the things that are important to us, including money, we can greatly improve our lives.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness just means giving your full attention to whatever you are doing at the moment and to the areas of your life that are important. Eating is an easy example. If you are trying to eat less to cut calories, the advice is to do nothing else while you’re eating. Don’t watch TV, don’t read a book, don’t mess around on the computer. Just eat, smell your food before you eat it, taste each bite, chew each bite thoroughly.

When you eat this way, you eat less. If you want a comparison, eat whatever your weakness is, cookies, chips, in a mindful way and then while you’re doing something else at the same time. Count how many cookies or how much of the bag of chips you ate. You’ll find you did indeed eat more when you weren’t paying attention.

What Does This Have to Do With Money?

Our money is one of the most impactful areas to use mindfulness. When we don’t pay attention to where our money is going, it disappears like the chips we ate in front of the TV. When we don’t keep track of due dates, we pay bills late which means paying penalties and interest or even having services cut off.

When we don’t mind our money, we find ourselves aged 40 with no money saved for retirement or to help pay for our children’s college education.

Why Aren’t We More Mindful?

Why are we so often unmindful or our finances when even those of us with the most remedial personal finance skills know how important money is. And not in the sense that it’s important because it makes you happy, not everyone feels that way, but important in that if you don’t have enough, you might not have a place to live or any food to eat.

For some of us, it’s because we weren’t taught right money habits by our families and virtually none of us learned them in school. We don’t know what good money habits are or what bad ones are for that matter.

For almost all of us, money is a taboo subject. Even if we don’t mind discussing it, we’re unlikely to find a lot of people willing to talk about it with us. People who are doing well don’t want to feel as though they’re bragging and those not doing so well feel embarrassed or ashamed. And some of us just find the whole subject too boring to be worthy of discussion no matter how we’re doing.

How often do you use cash when you make purchases? It’s preferable to use a credit card because you get rewards and it’s easier to track spending. But swiping that card rather than seeing cash disappear out of your wallet can lead to money mindlessness. Cash is less ephemeral than a credit card.

You can’t use cash for everything of course, but you can use it for the things most of us tend to overspend on; food, entertainment, drinks, little odds and ends like a soda and snack when we buy gas. If you mindlessly swipe your credit card to pay for those things and then wonder why you can’t save any money, start paying for them with the envelope method.

Budget how much you can spend on those things for the month. Take out that amount of cash and divide it among envelopes marked for each category. When an envelope is empty, you can’t spend anything else on that category for the month.

The envelope method helps you develop money mindfulness.