Am I wasting my time chasing quick money tips?

I struggle with carving out time to spend on my finances. I want to be on top of them, but it feels really time-consuming. How much time should I be spending on them?

This might surprise you, but you can set your finances up in a way that allows you to manage your money and build wealth with less than one hour per week of maintenance.

People often think managing your finances has to be very time-consuming. But it doesn’t. Here are some common mistakes that make it more time-consuming than necessary:

Chasing tips, tricks and tactics. There is a whole world of money management tips that focus on short-term wins – whether it’s bargain hunting and no-spend challenges to save money, or hopping from one investment to another searching for a quick profit.

These tips might deliver short-term benefits, but they are short-lived in nature. You’ll always be stuck on the hamster wheel, looking for the next quick win.

This is what makes it feel ‘hard’ and like ‘a lot of work’. If saving money is dependent on you constantly monitoring your behaviour, second-guessing every purchase, micromanaging every dollar, then your experience of saving money will be mentally and emotionally taxing.

Most of your time isn’t being spent “doing your finances”. It’s being spent in an emotional response to your finances.

If growing an investment portfolio means constantly watching the markets, reading the finance news, monitoring your portfolio, lots of buying and selling of investments, then you’re going to think investing is a very time-consuming activity (because for you, it is).

My preference is to focus on strategies that produce compounding benefits long-term. For example – creating a streamlined savings system that manages your income, expenses and savings for you, instead of relying on savings tips.

Or having an investment strategy you can maintain long-term (ie. 10+ years), instead of accumulating a random assortment of investments that ‘might’ do well in a few years.

Long-term strategies take a bit of extra work in the short term, but they deliver more results with less work in the long term because the compounding creates exponential growth.

Spending more time thinking and avoiding than doing. If you think about the individual actions you need to take, they probably don’t take that long.

Clicking a few buttons to move your money from your bank account to your investment account, and buying an investment? Doesn’t take long. Moving your superannuation from the default portfolio to a high-growth portfolio? Doesn’t take long.

Usually, what’s chewing up a lot of time is the mental and emotional energy you spend thinking about your financial tasks.

You might spend more time thinking – “I should do that”, “Ugh, I don’t feel like doing it, it’s going to take so long” – than actually doing the task itself.

Even when you do sit down to the task, you might be spending more time dealing with the emotions that come up than doing the task itself – the dread of looking at your bank statements, the fear of looking at your portfolio after a market downturn, the boredom of trying to make sense of your taxes.

If you think about it, most of your time isn’t being spent “doing your finances”. It’s being spent in an emotional response to your finances. This creates the illusion that it takes a long time.

But it does get better if you stick with it. The beginning will feel rough. You’ll feel a lot of resistance. But if you can keep at it on a consistent schedule and work through the emotions that come up, then over time it will feel less painful. Eventually, it will become your new normal.

Overcomplicating it. Like many people, at the beginning of my personal finance journey I overcomplicated it. But eventually, I realised: half the things I was spending time on made no material impact on my financial growth. It was busywork that made me feel clever at best and stressed-out at worst.

You can have many different apps, tools, templates, spreadsheets. You can keep up with the finance news, watch the markets, closely monitor your portfolio, always be on the lookout for tiny optimisations so you can have perfectly optimised finances.

If this brings you joy, go for it. But for the rest of the population who want to spend less time on their finances and more time living their lives, the good news is these bells and whistles are not required.

You can create a simple financial system that manages your money and builds wealth, with minimal ongoing maintenance. I know it’s possible because I’ve helped many of my clients do it.

This requires you to get clear on the few things that make a real difference, create systems to streamline and automate where possible, and give yourself permission to let go of the rest.

Paridhi Jain is a money and mindset coach who combines practical strategies with mindset transformation to help clients create more freedom and fulfillment in wealth, work and life.

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