Every part of your life impacts your mental and physical wellbeing, this includes your finances. Your Financial Health can have a massive and highly correlated effect on your overall wellbeing. This article aims to tell you why and what you can do about it.
The Impact of Financial Health:
Feeling like you don’t have enough money to get by can be an intensely stressful experience, and the impact of this kind of stress can be absolutely devastating to your health.
There are a litany of issues that this causes, but some of the worst examples are as follows:
- Loss of sleep,
- Poor mental health,
- Reduced immune function,
- Trouble concentrating,
- Issues with decision-making,
- Etc.
What’s worse, this is just one aspect of how poor financial health can worsen your wellbeing. There are plenty of other avenues to consider.
The Opposite of Luxury:
For example, when you don’t have enough money to get by, you are going to have to start stretching what you do have as much as you can. For many people, this can mean taking some pretty desperate measures.
For example, if you start buying lower-quality food and medication because you can’t afford to invest in what you need, that can often feel like a way to stretch your cash out. However, this often-unavoidable cost-cutting endeavor can have some truly negative impacts on your well-being.
After all, your body is a complicated thing, and when you start cutting back on what you are feeding yourself – whether in terms of frequency, quality, or both – you are going to see some pretty negative changes to how well your body can work.
You will probably start getting sick more easily and find that you don’t have the energy to do as much; this can get even worse if you start to cut out on sleep. So, you might want to think about it before investing in extra work.
Strategies for Improving Your Financial Health:
Now that you better understand how your financial health can – and does – impact your well-being, you might be interested in what you can do to start improving your finances.
Fortunately, there are only ever going to be two steps to increasing your financial health.
1. Cut Your Costs
The first – and easily the most difficult – step is to reduce the amount of money you are spending in any way you can. A good place to start is by considering your weekly grocery shop and how you might be able to reduce how much you spend there.
However, you should think about everything – from using services like Shiply to save money when you hire a courier to planting your own vegetables so that you spend less on what you use later on.
2. Boost Your Income
Of course, cutting costs is only one side of this process; the other step is making more money to spend.
There are many ways in which you might be able to make a little bit of extra cash on a regular basis. Such as:
- Asking your boss for a raise.
- Taking up freelance work alongside your job.
- Finding a higher-paying position.
- Starting a side hustle.
- Working multiple positions.
However, it is good to remember that none of these options are guaranteed to yield results. There is no sure-fire way to make more money, only potential options that you might want to consider. What’s more, pretty much all of these require a huge amount of effort on your part to maintain, making them difficult in their own right.
