Many, many people today are dealing with serious financial problems, in the aftermath of the 2008 stock market crash and the ensuing recession and financial crisis. In some ways, the current economic ‘recovery’ is akin to the hangover and feelings of regret following a major New Year’s Eve bender.

Sure, you think, I’ll start over.  No more partying.  I’ll stop using credit and really start saving. Can you really do it this time?

One of the issues that’s come out of the current economic crisis and hoped-for

 

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recovery is the issue of financial discipline, at the personal level as well as for corporations and the federal government.  The crisis have forced everyone to take a good hard look at their spending patterns and confront the real problem of living beyond our means.

How do we find the discipline to stop overspending and start building up our savings? One of the things to realize is that money is more than simply a coin or piece of paper with numbers printed on it. It seems strange to think it, but money is actually an idea.  It’s a concept that symbolizes the amounts we are trading between each other for the goods we want to have. It’s a symbol of value.

This fairly esoteric notion can be helpful if we realize that money, being an “idea” doesn’t rule us.  We simply have to start getting more comfortable with the notion of what money really means in our lives, so we can take more control of where it takes us—and exert more discipline over how we use it, for our own sake.

If we can all just get serious about our financial discipline and our notions of what money is, we can get ourselves to a place of greater financial security, with less debt and more savings in place.