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Your Financial Fears

What are your financial fears? What scares you about your financial life? Today we’ve got to confront your fears. This is a healthy and necessary step toward financial wellness. 

To follow our analogy - we’ve got to bushwack through some underbrush on the way to climbing this peak. We’ve got to climb some creeks and wade some waters on our way to our goals

Commonly, veterinary students tell us that they have a fear of:

• Being in debt forever 
• Being broke their entire life
• Not being able to retire
• Not being able to enjoy life, or
• Not being able to follow the career path that they want due to debt. 

Is there something like this on your mind? Do you have deep-set concerns? That’s OK! 

It’s perfectly healthy to be fearful and have concerns. 

The key is to confront these fears and control them before they produce anxiety. The key is to know and control these fears before they control you. 

Before you can confront things you’re afraid of, you have to identify them! 

On your walk today, while exercising, meditating or driving, spend some time thinking about and identifying your financial fears. Is it a fear of failure? A fear of lack of freedom?

Does your debt feel like a storm cloud that follows you around? 

For me, my student debt feels like a hidden secret that no one knows about, except me and the bankers! Years ago this concerned me, like I had a dirty secret that people would gasp at. Maybe I was ashamed of the debt.  

Once I learned to tame the student debt, and once I had a plan to control it, the better I felt. Basically, the more I dealt with it, the more comfortable I got. 

It helped to talk to others, run the numbers and understand it. 

Most importantly, once I realized that my debt was the necessary gateway to my career and current life, it became acceptable and understandable. 

The debt was needed to allow me to have the income and lifestyle that I have now. Basically it took time for me to understand that the student debt was healthy and ok. 

This was nothing to be ashamed of. 

The day that I identified that fear of my student debt, understood it, and confronted it was a wonderful day. I see veterinarians that struggle with anxiety, depression and even suicidal thoughts. Professional help is needed, but there is likely an underlying fear that they have to conquer. 

Many times veterinarians know something is wrong. They are anxious, dealing with depression and they hate their jobs. But they don’t know why. It’s hard to identify the underlying issues. The studies show that many times the underlying issue is financial and money driven, but people don’t have the tools to identify and combat the issue. 

 Today is about digging deep and making sure you identify potential issues before they become overwhelming. 

Whatever your fear, let’s work to identify it. Let’s try to understand it and take steps to confront it. We have to do this before it produces anxiety and depression. We must do this before fear takes over our lives. This is hard work, but is absolutely necessary to be financially well. 

Conquering Financial Fears

Now once you’ve identified your financial fears, we’ve got to overcome them. 

They may be real and correct, but they also may be completely unfounded. 

Your fears may take root from your financial history, like something you watched your parents go through, or they may come out of thin air. 

Whatever your fears are, if they exist, we have to conquer them. 

We have to prove to ourselves that we have a good plan and the resources to keep the fear from happening. 

To me this is like doing something really scary for the first time. Like riding a horse, or bungy jumping. The first time you’re deathly afraid. Your body goes into flight or flight. But you tell yourself everything will be ok. After 10, 20, 30 times, your body realizes you’ll be ok. You become comfortable. You’re no longer afraid. 

The financial fears are the same way, you have to face them until you become comfortable. Until you can think clearly and without a fight or flight response. 

For example: 

• If your fear is being overwhelmed with student debt, then you will learn everything you can and need to know about repayment options. 
• If your fear is not being able to retire because of your career choice, then you will learn everything you can and start to contribute to a retirement fund early in your career. (Everyone needs to do this, regardless of fears). 

So you combat your fears by learning, educating yourself and knowing everything will be ok. 

Here’s one of the most important aspects of identifying your fears. Identifying and understanding your fears allows you to talk openly about them. If you and your friends, significant other, parent or sibling can talk about professors, relationships, and school you can certainly discuss your financial fears. 

There is something huge about getting your innermost fears out in the open. Something happens when you articulate these thoughts and bounce them off another person. 

They simply don’t seem as big and overwhelming anymore. They become smaller and easier to defeat. The path to counteract them often becomes easier to see. 

The other person can often help craft a plan, but most importantly can be someone for you to check in with your progress. 

This is a hard conversation to start in a friendship that hasn’t transversed these waters yet. However, you probably have a friend or sibling that you can take to this new level of trust.  

A mentor would also be an excellent person to have this discussion with. 

There is a huge component to consider here. That person may have financial fears as well. 

You could be doing them a massive favor by giving them a forum to articulate their fears! This is the colleagues helping colleagues approach that our profession needs more of. 

If you need to have this conversation, but don’t know or have the right person to discuss it with, here is an excellent resource. https://vinfoundation.org/resources/vets4vets/

Vets4Vets was created by the VIN Foundation exactly for situations like this. These veterinary professionals have walked in your shoes and are trained in how to help and how to listen. 

If you don’t use Vets4Vets, keep them in mind should you need to have a conversation about anything difficult in the future. 

Whatever your outlet, dig up your financial fears, bring them into the light of day and conquer them! Make a plan to keep them at bay. 

Let those fears know you are onto them and they will not be allowed to live deep in your subconscious. Most of all, don’t ignore them! They will come back with horrible timing. 

These exercises may seem corny and trivial. Don’t underestimate the power of your fears. Confront them while they are small. Remember that many veterinarians deal with these monsters throughout their career and issues like these financial fears are the unbecoming of some of our colleagues. Many more veterinarians can never reach financial wellness because of fears that cannot be controlled. We want you to have the tools and resources now, rather than later. 

This is a huge canyon to overcome on your path to financial wellness. It’s hard work, but you owe it to yourself to have these difficult conversations. 

Treating Your Financial Fears

Your financial fears are important. Ignoring them can lead to disastrous results. However, focusing on them too much can make them grow and proliferate. The correct treatment for financial fears, like everything else in life, is balance. 

Balance = a condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.

The key to treating and conquering your emotional fears is to establish balance for them in your life. Identify, characterize and expose your fears, but don’t dwell on or obsess over them. For example, if your financial fear is not being able to retire, spend some time learning about retirement strategies and accounts. 

When you are searching for a job and career, identify a retirement plan and contribution as an interest of yours. Then, as soon as you graduate and start receiving income, start automatically depositing money in a retirement account. Even if it’s $100-200 per month, the fact that you are starting early with the habit of saving first will help tremendously. 

Now, if you focus on that retirement account, checking it daily and following every up and down turn of the stock market, you will be sorely disappointed. 

The interest and deposits grow at a glacial pace. Checking it too often may trigger your fears, with thoughts like, “I’m doing everything I can and I’ll still never retire.”  

Not true, you have to trust the plan and the power of compounding interest. You should  check the accounts monthly at most, just to make sure your automatic deposit is occurring. That’s the balance that we look for to treat your fears correctly. 

Next, let’s take a psychological turn, if you haven’t heard it already, or if you don’t practice it, balance is the key to a happy, healthy life. We regularly hear about concepts like, “work-life balance” “Yin and Yang” and “Mind Body Spirit.” But take a few minutes to let these concepts sink in.  

Vet school is the perfect time and place to establish your balance. Treat your studies like your work, and balance them with your social, emotional and physical and financial life. This will develop healthy habits into your career and life. Allowing imbalance in your school life, with the thought of “I’ll correct it later” will do nothing but cause problems later on in your career. 

Every successful veterinarian that we know, in practice, academia, or industry has struggled with and constantly works on balance in their lives. The earlier you start the better off you will be. Treating your fears, and treating your life with balance is the best medicine I can prescribe!