What Are Your Financial Values?
You live your values every day. The time you wake up, where you work, whom you spend time with, and how you relax reflect choices, trade-offs, and priorities that reinforce your values.
The same concept applies to how you spend your money. Your money identity informs your financial values.
Exploring your financial values helps you align your spending and investing with what’s important to you. Aligning your finances with your values provides clarity and actionable steps to achieve your financial goals.
What Are Financial Values?
Your financial values are your core beliefs and principles that shape your relationship with money and drive decisions regarding spending, saving, and investing. These values are typically shaped by your demographics, including the following:
Age
Family’s values
Religious or spiritual beliefs
Culture
Socio-economic background
Examples of financial values include:
Freedom
Security
Legacy
Generosity
Experiences
Why Are Financial Values Important?
Financial values help prioritize and allocate your monetary resources to reflect what matters most to you. For instance, if you care about social justice or the environment, you could prioritize supporting these causes through your investment choices or charitable giving.
Understanding your financial values provides clarity, direction, and fulfillment in your monetary life. These values guide your decisions about the following:
Charitable giving
Legacy planning
Regularly reflecting on your financial values and evaluating how you allocate your money helps determine whether your money aligns with what you feel is most important. Aligning your money with your values contributes to the following:
Compassion
Responsibility
Generosity
Loyalty
Justice
Self-love
How Do You Define Your Financial Values?
You can explore your financial values in many ways:
Reflect on the financial values you learned from your family or culture while growing up.
Meditate.
Journal.
Use a friend as a sounding board.
Asking the following questions can help determine what matters most in your everyday life:
What is important to you? Examples include health, family, spirituality, career, adventure, stability, peace of mind, community, and education.
Who is important to you? Examples include certain relatives, friends, community members and groups, and pets.
If you had all the money in the world, how would you spend your time?
If you could move the dial in one or two areas to change the world, what would they be?
Be as specific as possible when answering these questions to determine what matters most to you. Making a difference by supporting important causes provides personal fulfillment.
4 Steps to Discover Your Financial Values
The following four steps can help determine your financial values:
1. Make a List of How Money Affects You
Brainstorm the areas where money impacts your life, such as the following:
Education
Where to live
Career
Your most meaningful lifestyle
Social endeavors
Charitable giving
Health
Then, write down a few goals in each area to work toward. Ensure you express your authentic values and goals.
2. Prioritize Your Financial Values
Prioritize your most important financial values to help clarify your goals:
Include 5-year, 10-year, and 20+-year goals.
Understand how your financial values and goals can change over time and how they can impact your prioritization process.
Imagine yourself achieving each goal, including what it looks and feels like.
Determine which three goals would be most meaningful for you to pursue.
3. Understand Why a Financial Value Feels Essential
Knowing why a financial value is important to you helps you connect emotionally and stay true to it. This connection encourages you to continue moving forward during difficult situations.
Asking these questions can help you uncover your most meaningful financial values:
Where or from whom did you learn this value?
What or whom are you honoring in the pursuit of this value?
How does this financial value connect to your personal core values?
4. Reflect and Take Action
Look at your spending, saving, and lifestyle choices and determine whether they honor the financial values you expressed. Consider which values you align with and which you do not, then make adjustments to your daily living.
Periodically revisit this process as your values evolve. Compare what you spend your money on to your expressed financial values, then determine how closely you are honoring your authentic self.
Ask yourself the following questions to evaluate whether you are living your financial values:
Which types of organizations do you give time or money to?
How does your day-to-day work align or not align with your societal values?
How do your most pressing concerns for the world, such as climate change and inequality, interact with your personal goals?
*This information is for educational purposes only.
What are your financial values? Let me know in the comments!
Comments