How Investing Increases Your Self-Esteem

This guest post is by Andrea Travillian of Take a Smart Step.

Feel like you need a boost in self esteem?  Well you could follow the traditional advice and go get counseling or use positive affirmations. How about, instead of that, you try using investing to increase your self esteem?

How investing increases self esteem

1. You get the opportunity to see something grow, that you helped produce. Investing is similar to planting a garden and getting the benefit of seeing your food grow and then enjoying the great taste. Anytime you create something from the ground up, you’ll have increased self esteem.
2. You feel empowered that you are doing something to take control of your future and change your life. If you have ever started an exercise program, you’ll understand that as you made progress and changed your life you felt better, emotionally and physically.  Anytime you take action to make your life better, your self esteem increases.
3. Investing decreases stress, which makes you feel like there is one less thing that you’re struggling with. How? Money creates a sound financial base, which decreases stress. Decreased stress allows you to be more creative and have more energy for the rest of your life, thus helping you increase self esteem.
4. Investing gives you a sense of accomplishment.  Kids develop self esteem by doing things on their own, like tying their shoes.  You too can develop self esteem by investing on your own.

Alright, so you are with me on investing creates self esteem?  But you still have excuses popping up that won’t allow you to get started?  You don’t have enough money, enough time, or enough knowledge?  Well I have some answers to hopefully give you the boost you need to get going!

Not enough money?

If you’re interested in increasing your self esteem, then most likely you are willing to pay for things like counseling and books to help you.  Why not take that money and save it instead?  Consider it another form of therapy.

Another option would be to begin to budget. Budgeting has a tendency to make us feel like we have more money since we quit wasting it.  When we see that we spend four hundred dollars at the spa we might quickly decide that fifty dollars would be better put to our investment.

Not enough time?

Do you have time to watch an hour of TV?  Then you have time to set up an investment.  It really does not take much time!  Don’t have an hour to watch TV?  I am sure that you can find one hour somewhere else in the day—I know that I’d waste at least one hour a day.

You could try waking up one hour early to get your investment set up.  If you set it up on an automatic program, you will be done with just one day of waking early. Just one hour less sleep for one day and you are on your way to higher self esteem!

Don’t know how to invest?

This is one of the best parts of using investing to increase self esteem, because by learning something new you increase your self esteem. So not only do you get the benefit of increased self esteem from investing, but you get more self esteem from learning something new. Let’s look at how you can get started.

Getting Started

So are you ready to start investing to build your self esteem?  Following is a short list of how to get going.

Learn how to invest

If you don’t know how to invest, start learning. Do this by starting to read about investing.  There are many ways to do this, read a magazine  like Smart Money, read a book (I recommend Investing for Dummies), or start studying blogs and websites like Morning Star.  Even small doses of five or ten minutes each day will help you start to learn.

Start saving

Start putting aside a small amount each month to start building your investment experience.  You would not start your first garden by planting an entire acre; you would most likely start out with a few plants and expand your garden each year.  This allows you to learn about what works and what doesn’t while building your knowledge and confidence.  Your investment can even be as small as $25 a month—every little bit helps.

Create a way to track your investment growth

Your tracking tool might be very simple—it could even involve taking out a piece of paper and writing down how much you have at the end of each month.  By posting this you will get to visually see your investments growing.  Watching something grow, like a garden, gives you a sense of achievement. Now you can begin to bask in the glow of your increased self esteem, and your growing wealth.

Do you have an investment? How have saving and investing helped your self-esteem? Share your experiences in the comments.

Andrea Travillian teaches personal finance with the goal of building your financial confidence.   Get your free copy ebook and mp3 on money and contentment at Take a Smart Step.