Why Financial Stress can damage your life and how to find your path to Financial Freedom
Learn how to Smartvest in order to liberate yourself financially
You might be wondering what Smartvestments are. As the name indicates, Smartvestments are a smarter way to practice investing, in order to ensure your assets create more passive wealth for you and your valuable time and effort aren’t wasted needlessly.
Through education and careful planning, Smartvestments can be the best tool to reach financial independence and to shape your future without the constraints imposed by financial insecurity. And this tool is more necessary now than ever.
Financial stress is a modern-day psychological plague
Financial stress is spreading across the globe at historically higher rates than we’ve ever seen before. Even though people arguably have better living conditions now than they did in the past, financial stress is at an all-time high due to the impact modern living has on our perspective of wealth.
Think about it, in this day and age, we don’t perceive money simply as something to earn and spend on our needs and wants, like our historical counterparts might have. Money has become something more philosophical in nature, as well as intrinsic to our way of life. Today, money can mean many things: opportunity, freedom, self-esteem, comfort, discovery, self-actualization, and even love. That is why financial stress can have a disastrous effect on us if left unchecked.
Physical health aspects
Scientists have discovered that the scarcity of money can lead to more health problems than those caused only by issues usually associated with poverty, such as inadequate nutrition, delayed healthcare, or exhaustion from being overworked. There are other physical effects on the human body caused by stress in general, but by financial stress in particular, like headaches, backaches, ulcers, and increased blood pressure.
Mental health aspects
In addition to these, being constantly worried about how little money you have can take a heavy toll on your mental health, causing anxiety and depression through prolonged exposure to financial stress. In fact, reportedly at least 72% of Americans feel financially stressed at least ‘some of the time’. Other results of the psychological impact of financial stress also include unhealthy coping behaviors such as overeating, smoking, alcohol use, and drug use, which can damage the mind and the body.
Intelligence aspects
What’s even more terrifying is that recent studies have shown how financial stress can lead to lowering a person’s IQ by UP TO 13 POINTS.
Researchers have asked the same participants to take classical IQ tests in two different scenarios: one in which they have fewer expenses to worry about and one in which they have more expenses. When put in the second scenario, the test scores were significantly lower, as low as they would be if the participant had lost a good night’s sleep.
“The idea is that financial stress monopolizes thinking, making other calculations slower and more difficult, sort of like the effects of going without sleep for a night.” Herald & News
This is due to the fact that when financial stress takes hold of your thoughts, there’s little time and incentive to think about anything else, not to mention less time for learning, self-improvement, and problem-solving.
These findings reveal that there is a real threat to modern humans which, although caused by external factors and learned financial behavior, is an entirely internal process that can lead to self-destruction if not managed timely and properly.
Be SMART about it
Fortunately, there is a way to combat this process and even reverse it, which is to work on your financial intelligence. Financial intelligence is actually the total amount of absorbed knowledge and education regarding money transformed into mindful practices and habits. When these are implemented, a person’s energy can be put into something other than thinking about how to manage stress.
It’s kind of like getting a dishwasher. You can worry all day about not having the time or energy to wash the dishes while they keep piling up and messing up your living space and your mental health, or you can get a dishwasher, throw the big load in and do something more valuable with your time while the dishes are getting clean with little to no action on your part.
In other words, taking action now in order to liberate yourself from the stress and anxiety that builds up from not having taken action sooner will drive you towards the freedom of managing your time as you see fit. That is what being financially intelligent can do for you.
The best tool you can possibly have in this journey is learning how to integrate Smartvestments into your financial habits.
How to use Smartvestments to your advantage
We at IXFI have been working on a platform where people not only invest but do so with the right education and knowledge behind the practice, in order to diminish, mitigate and avoid the unnecessary risks classically associated with investing.
Any investment is a risk you take that can result in winning or losing, but Smartvestments have the advantage that they are well-informed and carefully planned decisions of where to put your money, which means that the chances of success are significantly higher.
So, as the compound suggests, Smartvestments are smarter ways to invest your assets in order to achieve financial freedom and to let your money work for you, giving you the opportunity to create a Smart Passive Income, and the following steps are crucial to accomplishing that:
- Gain financial knowledge — understanding how money works is essential.
- Make sure you know what your assets and liabilities are.
- Create a plan to reduce your liabilities as much as possible.
- Set up a short-term as well as a long-term plan for saving money.
- Understand and research investments — commodities, stocks, cryptocurrencies, and bonds.
- Create an investment strategy that suits YOU best.
- Be mindful — don’t just go with the flow, make deliberate choices and stick to your plans.
Through educational articles, helpful tips, and, perhaps the most valuable tool, the Playground environment, IXFI aims to equip you with the necessary information you need to empower yourself and get rid of financial stress for good. Putting these readily available tools to good use would be a very financially intelligent decision on your part, so stop investing and start Smartvesting with IXFI.
