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This advice might surprise you.
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If you’re hoping to improve your financial situation over time, there may be lots of tasks to check off your to-do list. Depending on your current reality, for example, you could aim to put more money into your savings account. Or you could be focused on making more than the minimum payments to help your credit card debt disappear ASAP.
While there are many specific goals you may be working toward, there could also be some general steps you need to take that could make a really big difference in how effective you are at building wealth and achieving all of your desired objectives with money over the long term.
For example, Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich, has some great advice everyone should follow that can help them improve many aspects of their financial lives. Here’s what it is.
Do this to get better about money in 2023
No matter what you’re hoping to accomplish in your own financial life, Sethi advises doing one simple thing that could help you be more successful.
“If money is important to you, find a community where you can push each other to get better in 2023,” Sethi advised. He gave this tip in response to a Twitter follower who commented on how fortunate they were to have a community with shared values that helped them stay on track toward their financial objectives.
Why is Sethi’s advice important to follow?
Sethi’s suggestion to find a community of people with shared values isn’t the traditional advice you might hear from finance experts. Instead, experts often focus more on the specifics of different goals, such as in what order you should pay down debt or whether you should pay with cash to spend less and avoid the risk of debt.
But it can make a much more profound difference when you take a big-picture view of your financial situation — and it’s advice that could pay off over the long term and affect every aspect of your efforts to build wealth.
See, the behavior of people around you can shape your own behavior. If you are part of a community of people who always spend every dollar they get and who don’t worry much about saving for the future, you’re more likely to see this as normal behavior — and you’re more likely to engage in it yourself. In fact, you may not even realize there are other alternatives out there if you live and work with people who behave this way.
But if you intentionally seek out and become part of a group where everyone is focused on accomplishing financial goals, you’re going to be more motivated to do that — and you can benefit from the collective knowledge of that group. You can share your own progress to help hold yourself accountable, and you can also see what techniques others are using that you can incorporate into your own efforts.
Having a community that pushes you to learn more, to do better, and to stay on track will be invaluable as you move through different goals because you can turn to them as a source of support. So follow Sethi’s advice and find your community this year.
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