Gratitude for Milestones

I got an email from a past Boot Camp member the other day. She wanted to let me know she’s passed the milestone of accumulating over $100,000 between her reserves and retirement, and that she was grateful. 

That’s a huge number. Who wouldn’t be grateful to be staring at that number on a piece of paper? 

It made me wonder, though, if she experienced gratitude along the way, with every deposit into her savings and retirement account. When people start trying to figure out what's wrong with their money, they dive into the details. They pour through their credit card statements, utility bills and examine how much they’re eating out. They look at the amount they’re putting away every month. Details are important, but they can also keep you from seeing what is most important: the big picture. 

It’s hard, month in and month out, to get excited when you’ve paid just a portion of a debt off, or put just a little away in savings. That singular action you take by sending money to your 401k or IRA or emergency reserves account is one thread of your overall safety net. We should find a way to be just as grateful for that one thread, as we are for the whole net. It’s all of those threads that help us weave the entire net.

Experiencing the gratitude propels us forward as well. There isn’t much better in life than the feeling of deep gratitude. It’s the kind of feeling that you want to recreate. Connecting that level of deep gratitude of caring for yourself via your savings, and for reaching such an important milestone makes us want to do it again, build more, and hit the next milestone.

I have a debt that I’ve been working on paying off. It’s a large debt that I want gone. Sometimes I’m not all that happy about sending that check off every month. Sometimes I’m annoyed at myself for having the debt. But when I was looking at my own big picture numbers this month, I realized that I’m at the one-third of the way to the milestone of it being gone, and that I’ve made a huge dent in the overall debt. Deep gratitude swept over me, and when I sent the check this month, I smiled to see it go. 

I hope I can remember every time I send that check off to keep smiling. I hope I can remember that sense of gratitude.

What one little thing do you do every month that you should be grateful for?

-Stacey Powell

Finance Gym offers personal finance coaching in professionally facilitated peer-advisory groups. 
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