New Year is a busy time for me, which isn’t surprising - ‘improving finances’ is the second most common New Year’s resolution.

I can absolutely help with that resolution, but before I do, I have a question.

What are you hoping the pay-off will be if you go the effort of improving your finances?

Because improving your finances will take effort. It’s emotional. It’s guaranteed to be messy, because money is just a reflection of life. And it’s ongoing – although the effort curve does taper off, it never returns to zero.

So why bother?

Here’s what I’ve heard from clients over the years.

Firstly, they experience fewer unpleasant emotions. They no longer worry or feel embarrassed about a whole range of different things:

• how they’ll handle large, inevitable expenses, like a car repair
• how they would cope if they lost their job
• their health deteriorating because they skip regular check-ups due to cost
• that they’ll never find a life partner who’s happy to take on their dire debt situation

Sometimes the problem isn’t what they fear will happen in the future, it’s that their present is less than perfect. Improving their finances has meant that many of my clients have been able to:

• quit a high-paying job that they hate
• move out of an unpleasant living situation
• stop dealing with constant calls from debt collection agencies
• spend money to fix something that made them feel ashamed

And then there are the wonderful things that improving their finances means they get to do:

• Work less, and spend more time with people that they love
• Take opportunities – to re-train, to invest, to move cities
• Do the things that bring them joy and make memories
• Know for sure that they can afford the things they are buying
• Help the people that they love
• Move from survival mode to thriving
• Move from thriving to spending some of their time, energy and money to make the world more like the way they think it should be

So why bother to fix your finances?

Because what’s on the other side is wonderful.