The thing about money is, for most people, it’s as much a mental battle as it is about earning and saving.
And by changing our mindset we can conquer our feelings toward money and concentrate on earning more.
Hopefully, this post helps to give you a different way to look at money, how it’s earned, and how abundant it really is.
Wealth starts in the mind so let’s get started with 10 Mental Money Hacks.
Mental Money Hacks
There’s No Shortage of Money
Too often we see money as something hard to get. Like it’s in short supply or a rare commodity.
But money is everywhere and has rarely been in short supply. In fact, there are over 7 billion people on the planet that have some sort of money.
Therefore, if we could get a percentage of 1 percent of 7 billion people to spend money with us for a product or service we’d earn a good living.
The point is to stop thinking of money as a finite resource. Money is everywhere and flows like rivers and streams. All we need to do is earn a small portion of it.
Spend Time Around Money
Spending time with people who have money is a mental money hack that changes our mindset.
After all, we are products of our environment.
Even something as simple as eating out at an expensive restaurant once per month can change the way we see money.
Find wealthy friends or spend time where there is an abundance of cash and see how it affects your view. Put yourself in a wealthy environment and see how the environment changes your thinking.
Weekends Make Wealth
A lot of us work all week at a job making someone else wealthy.
And at the end of the week, we rejoice because it’s Friday night. We spend Saturday nursing our hangover while binge-watching TV and come Sunday we’re dreading the upcoming Monday.
The thing that I don’t understand about people and weekends is, how many folks, think it’s a time to relax and let off the throttle.
We’re basically unwilling to work harder for ourselves than we are for our boss at our soul-sucking job that we hate.
The weekends are the perfect time to invest in ourselves and make better financial decisions.
Time better spent on the weekends could include:
- A side hustle
- Learning about money and increasing our financial IQ
- A Part-time job
- Balancing our checkbook and organizing our finances
- Learning a skill that could end up being of value
- Calling creditors and other companies and negotiating discounts on bills
There are a lot of things we could do on our weekends to make ourselves smarter and more valuable. Weekends truly do make wealth and it’s important to use our time wisely.
With enough hard work on the weekends, you may just be able to escape your 9-5 for good.
Money Loves Value
A mental money hack to attract money is to make yourself valuable.
And in order to be a valuable person you need to do one of 3 things, if not all, of the following.
- Learn skills
- Gain knowledge
- Solve problems
Skills, knowledge, and solving problems are ways to get paid every time.
Value attracts money and people and employers will always pay for something they find value in. Find a niche and learn everything you can about it or figure out a problem that you can solve for someone.
The formula to remember here is Value + Action = Money
Life Is Like Monopoly
The board game Monopoly is about as honest as a board game you can play.
And when we play Monopoly there are really only 3 things that can happen.
- 1. Roll the dice, pass Go, collect $200, make investments, collect money off of other players, take over the board, and win the game.
Number one is the best strategy and outcome. In all reality, this is what we should implement in our lives. Make money, invest in passive income, and live happily.
- 2. Continuously circle the board, pay rent and fees as we go, hope we make it to Go, collect our $200 and live to see another round.
This strategy is what many people do with their lives. Living from paycheck to paycheck, hoping they don’t land on someone else’s Boardwalk. While this strategy keeps us in the game, it never allows us to get ahead.
You have to take risks in Monopoly to get ahead and when we don’t invest in other sources of income we’re stuck like hamsters on a wheel.
- 3. Go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
This is obviously the worst possible outcome in a metaphoric sense. In real life, this is when we are in a dead-end job, up to our eyeballs in debt, with no idea as to how to correct the situation.
Jail is bad and too often we create our own prison by overspending and racking up consumer debt.
The point is, that the rules of winning Monopoly are the same rules that we adhere to in life.
It’s imperative to collect our money and make sure we spend less than we make. To further optimize our success, it’s important to invest in income sources such as real estate and other passive sources.
Hours for Dollars Doesn’t Pay
How most people see making money.
- 40 Hours X $10/Hour = $800
How you could see making money.
- 40 Products X $10/Product = $800
In the first equation, we’re selling hours and the available hours we have to sell are limited. We only have 24 hours within a day and it’s impossible to sell all of them on a consistent basis.
The problem with selling our time is we only have so much to sell and our inventory is shrinking day by day.
In the second equation, we are selling a product. A product could be a book, course, manufactured product, etc.
The difference in the second equation is we’re not limited to how many we can sell in an hour’s time.
For example, we could sell 1 Product/Hour and make $10 dollars or we could sell 500 Products/Hour and make $5000.
When we earn money that’s not contingent on our time we can make our earnings scale to a much larger size.
Changing the way we think about what we’re selling (time vs goods) to make money is a valuable mental money hack. Selling time has its limitations.
Give Yourself a Raise
So there are some extra bills coming up and money’s getting tight. This is when we start to think about asking the boss for a raise.
But what if you gave yourself a raise instead?
Give yourself a raise by
- Cutting out frivolous expenses
- Earning extra cash
That’s it. That’s the raise.
There are only 2 ways to get extra money and that’s to cut spending and make more.
But the point is to think in terms of: What can I do for myself?
A raise is totally up to you to create. Cut expenses and start earning with a side hustle to make those extra dollars yourself.
Put a Price on Your Time
My accountant charges $25 dollars for a 5-minute phone call.
And if you do the math that’s $300 per hour to talk on the phone.
Now, this is quite smart for a couple of non-obvious reasons.
- His clients don’t call with dumb questions they could Google
- By charging, he filters out time zombies (people that have no problem wasting other’s time)
- He values his time (he knows the value of what he could be making if he wasn’t on the phone)
- His knowledge wasn’t free to him (he has a degree and a significant investment of time and money to gain his experience)
If you find yourself giving out a lot of free advice and helping others with no gain to yourself, consider what you could be making doing other activities.
Your time is worth money. If you make $15 dollars per hour at your job what is your free time worth?
The answer is: it’s worth at least $15 dollars per hour.
Mental Money Hack #8 is to put a value on your time because time is the most finite resource we have.
Bill Hacking Made Simple
Figure out what the smallest bill you have is. In my case, it’s my internet bill at my home that totals $40 dollars per month.
Start a side hustle to eliminate your bills one by one.
For example
- Mowing neighbors grass: Profit = $40/Month – Pays Internet
- Flipping items online: Profit = $200/Month – Pays Utilities
- Doing odd jobs: Profit = $120/Month – Pays Phone Bill
- Blog Income: Profit =800/Month – Pays Rent
You get the idea of what bill hacking looks like and how it actually works.
Much like Dave Ramsey’s Snowball Method for debt, bill hacking lets you start small and work your way up until all of your bills are covered.
Once your bills are taken care of, you could ditch the 9-5 or continue for the extra money to spend, invest, and so forth.
The best part is, with the internet, it’s never been easier to make extra cash to cover expenses. Try it out and I’m willing to bet you’ll gain a different outlook on how to pay your bills.
Looking Sexy
This is probably the most important mental money hack of all of them.
The people who look like they have money are often the ones who have very little.
Almost everyone can get a loan on a nice fancy car. And the easiest way to look like you have money is to drive a really nice car. This is why everyone games looking rich by buying clothes and cars.
But the facts are, that a lot of people who flash their cash, are full of sh*t and probably in debt.
We don’t need to look wealthy to impress others. In fact, impressing others with money is usually a really expensive thing to do.
The people who get wealthy the fastest are the people who aren’t building wealth to buy things.
And no, money isn’t everything. However, money buys freedom, security, and options. 3 things that are pretty important.
Thanks for reading Mental Money Hacks. I hope you found this article useful.
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