Worry has a price tag ☕

Welcome to Inner Equity - my weekly newsletter about building financial confidence on the path to the life you want 🏡

Each week, we break down one meaningful money concept and leave you with an exercise that you can use to put it into practice.

This week, we’re looking at why worrying about money feels like taking care of it (and why it does the opposite) 👇️

If you check your balance most mornings, re-run the retirement math every few weeks, and still don’t feel any calmer, I wrote this one for you (I’ve caught myself doing it too).

It feels like responsibility, but most of it is worry (and worry has a price tag).

Peter Crone draws a line I keep coming back to: caring about money and worrying about it are two different things, from two different places.

Caring comes from wanting a good life for yourself and the people you’re responsible for. 

Worrying comes from an old hurt that never got resolved (a layoff, a parent who went broke, one bad year in your twenties).

Caring produces a decision and then lets you rest. Worry just produces the same question again tomorrow.

Say you earn $175,000, you’ve got $60,000 sitting in checking, and you’ve been meaning to “figure out what to do with it” for two years.

You’ve read up on high-yield savings and index funds, but you’ve done nothing, because doing something means you could be wrong.

At 4% in a high-yield savings account, that $60,000 earns about $2,400 a year (in checking it earns basically nothing!).

So two years of thinking about it has cost you $4,800. 

That’s worry, (it just felt like diligence), and the decisions worry guides tend to be worse. 

People who are worried sell in the dip, sit on too much cash, and then put the car repair on a 22% credit card because the savings account “has to stay untouched.”

So here's a simple test. The next time a money thought shows up, ask one question: 

What am I going to do about this?

If there's a specific, actionable answer (move the $60,000, raise the contribution, make the call), that's care. Do it, and the thought loop should resolve.

If there's no answer (or it's the same answer you've had forty times and never acted on) that's worry. 

It'll be back tomorrow, and no amount of attention changes that.

This week, separate the two. Keep a note open on your phone all week, then take 20 minutes on Friday:

1. Catch every money thought. “Should I put more in the 401(k)?” “What if the roof goes?” Don’t sort yet, just log.

2. Split them into two columns. Column one: thoughts with an action attached. Column two: thoughts without one.

3. Work column one. Put each action on the calendar with a date (anything under five minutes, just do it now).

4. Put a number on column two. For each worry, write the amount that would feel like enough (“I’d stop thinking about layoffs with $45,000 in the emergency fund“). Now it’s a target instead of a worry, and you can work a target.