In today’s Two Minute Q&A Tuesday, we’re going over how to stop financially comparing yourself to others. I personally know how hard this is, especially during the beginning stages of your financial journey. You feel every sacrifice to save your emergency fund and pay off your debt. Making you hyper-aware of other people’s finances. But what we fail to see is that everyone is on their own journey and doesn’t have the same destination as you. Here are a few ways to help you to stop comparing yourself to others and stay focused on where you’re going.
The quickest way to feel unhappy about yourself is to compare yourself to others.
Don’t Follow Others People’s Tail Lights
If we’re too busy following other people’s tail lights, how in the world are we going to focus on our own lane. We simply can’t. It’s okay to be aware of the other cars on the highway of course, but you have to be more focused on where you’re going. Because if we’re too focused on the cool car driving past us, we could easily miss our exit. I say this because we put a lot of energy where everyone else is compared to us. We don’t give ourselves the benefit of the doubt that we’re just starting our financial journey. No, we need to be there already. We focus so much on what we’re not doing, instead of focusing on what we are doing. The quickest way to feel unhappy about yourself is to compare yourself to others.
Your Further Ahead Than You Think
During our debt-free journey of paying off $99K of debt, we felt like we were standing still while everyone else was living their best life. I know this wasn’t how things really were, but it still felt like that. But what put things into perspective for me was all the sacrifices and challenges that people couldn’t even imagine. My family got hit with family emergencies, my son had open-heart surgery at 6 months, we didn’t travel, or go out to eat. And on top of all of that, we handled pausing our debt-free journey and all of our challenges with poise. And when we finally took our blinders off, we weren’t still as we thought. We were further than we could have ever imagined and people couldn’t believe we paid off all our debt in 5 years in California alone.
A lot of times we think we’re not moving fast enough, but in reality, we’re moving at a speed that’s just right for us. We have to consider our current circumstances and calculate that into how fast or slow we need to go. Don’t for a second downplay the effort and hard work you’re putting in to move forward. These are the ways that my family and I stopped comparing ourselves to others and I know it’s hard. But if I can do it, so can you,