Changing our money mindset

The hardest challenge I am finding when it comes to our money journey is our mindset. Bad habits are not easy to break overnight and sometimes it feels like we take 1 step forward and then 2 backwards. It has been frustrating at times however I am determined to change how we look at money and how we move forward with this in our journey starting with changing our money mindset.

When you fall into a bad routine, whether it be with money, food or anything else, it is hard to change that mindset. I think this is why we have had the up and down journey over the last few years. Too many times we have done things and then just taking stop being on the right path and go back to bad habits.

This has been us over the last few months, we were on a great path clearing debts, overpaying the mortgage and throwing all our savings at the debts. Then we got a bit lazy and stepped back into old habits, taking us backwards.

Over the last few weeks we have got ourselves back into the right mindset and are ploughing on, all be it a little slower than before. For this to happen though we have had to have an honest discussion on where we want to be, especially our plans to retire early.

Here are the changes we are going to try to achieve our goals –

1. Always make the overpayments – Regardless of what is going on, as soon as we get paid we are making the overpayments, even if it means we are going to be a little tighter that month.
2. Pocket money – We are allowing ourselves £30 each month to spend on what we like, so for me this month I needed a nail file for my gel nails, nothing exciting but the pocket money covers this and it is not an additional cost going out.
3. Changing our eating habits – I will share more on this next week, however, we are as a family changing our eating habits. We don’t go out much to eat so this will take into account takeaways etc.
4. Remembering the goals – Every day I remind myself of where I want to get to, I have found it focuses my mind a little if I start the day looking at where we are and how we’ve done so far. It also seems to fire me up more to keep pushing on.

I don’t expect to achieve things overnight and I know it is going to be a long old slog to get to where we want to get to. However, the thought of being mortgage-free and retired to the country is pushing me on. I also want to be able to show our children, you don’t need to be chained to the “normal” life that society portrays, make your life the one you want it to be!