How to cope with financial setbacks
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Trent Hamm Guest blogger
It happens to everyone at some point in their financial journey.
Everything is going along perfectly. Savings are building up. Debts are going down. Financial goals are being reached (or at least approached). It鈥檚 all chugging right along.
Then something happens.
Someone gets sick or, even worse, passes away. A car鈥檚 engine block fails. Someone gets fired or laid off from their job.
That smooth forward progress you鈥檝e been making? It鈥檚 just been rudely interrupted.
Whenever that happens, it can often feel like you鈥檙e just not making any progress at all over the long run.
After all, this bad event caused you to fall far back on your progress. It might have even caused you to end up roughly where you started.
When you look at it through that lens, it does look painful. All of this effort鈥� and for nothing?
I鈥檝e been in this situation personally and professionally. I鈥檝e worked hard and made enormous progress on many different things in my life, only to watch all of that progress fall apart because of something outside of my control.
It hurts. It鈥檚 frustrating. It leaves you wondering what the point is.
When I鈥檓 in those moments, I want to give up. There were many moments like that during the growth of The Simple Dollar, for example.
Every time I faced a crash, every time things fell apart, one simple thought kept me from giving up.
Where would I be right now if I had never bothered at all?
Your car just failed. What would your situation be like if you hadn鈥檛 spent the last few months getting your financial house in order?
You just lost your job. Where would you be without that emergency fund you diligently built up over the last six months?
It might feel like your progress is being undone, but actually the opposite is true. It鈥檚 your progress that is making this disaster much smaller than it would have otherwise been.
Bad things happen in life. One of the biggest reasons for keeping your financial house in order is so that you can build things up during the good times so that you鈥檙e protected during the down times.
If something bad happens and knocks you back to where you started, that means your effort worked like a charm. It turned something that could have been truly disastrous into something you could handle with relative ease.
That, my friends, is tremendous progress. It鈥檚 something to be proud of.
More importantly, it鈥檚 something worth repeating.
