Music Mondays - Cups

Cups – When I’m Gone

I have a confession to make, I am a HUGE Pitch Perfect fan, and in honor of this Friday’s premiere of Pitch Perfect 2, I thought I would share the song Cups (When I’m Gone) which Anna Kendrick’s character, Beca, sang when she tried out for the Bellas. I downloaded this song not long after Pitch Perfect came out and I remember listening to it during one of my walks and imagining that my money was singing to me the chorus:

When I’m gone, when I’m gone

You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone

From that point on, I like to use this song as a reminder to me before I actually spend my money on something. For years, I mindlessly spent money on things and experiences without regard for my money, and now I look back on that period of my life with regret and realize that I do miss my money now that it’s gone. Just as the singer in this song is urging her lover to value her before she leaves, we need to value our money before it leaves our bank account.

Mindfulness is the Key

The best way to value our money before it leaves our bank account is to become mindful of it in the first place. Many of my clients have no idea how much money they spend in a given month. They have a general guess or they have a spreadsheet of what they should be spending; however, once I start tracking their spending, we realize that the actual numbers are very different from the guesses.The reason why the perception and the reality are so far off is that they are not mindful of their spending. It’s easy to lose track when you swipe cards at every point of sale, and with each mindless swipe of the card, another dollar leaves your bank account never to be seen again. If you find yourself in this mindless swiping vicious cycle, you should switch to cash payments for a while. You may lose rewards points or other credit card benefits, but you will instantly become mindful of your money before it leaves your bank account.

What Else Will You Miss?

Last week both my blog site and my company site were hacked. I have a post coming up about that on Wednesday; however, the whole experience made me realize that I missed my site and it’s security while it was gone. It was a painful experience to miss my sites and discover that there was more I could have done to protect them.Over the past week, I have performed a personal audit of all that is important to me with the intention of making sure that I am protecting and valuing everything as I should before it’s gone, and I encourage you to do the same thing. Sit down and write a list of all that’s important in your life and next to each person, place or thing, think about if you have done everything to protect if, and if not, put a plan in place for how you plan to safeguard it. This could involve insurance, savings strategies or behavior changes. Whatever the case may be, don’t wait another minute to protect what’s valuable to you, because you don’t want to miss it when it’s gone.

What would you miss if it were gone? Have you protected against that? Has your site ever been hacked? Are you as excited for Pitch Perfect 2 as I am?