A Mental Game To Help You Make Plans After Earning A Lot Of Money Quickly

Whether you win the lottery, find a box of gold in the basement, get a bonus at work, earn a commission on a ‘whale’ sale or sell a business… from time to time you will receive big chunks of money all at once. It can be an emotional experience.

Sometimes, you get excited and feel like you need to do something with the money. Other times, you begin to feel lazy, like you don’t need or want to do anything at all.

However you’re feeling, if you’ve just gotten a big sum of cash and feel at all different in any way, here is a mental game to play with yourself to return back to your center.

Mental Game: “If I Didn’t Have This Money, What Would I Do?”

You didn’t have the money yesterday, so this shouldn’t be too difficult. It will highlight how quickly your brain started making big plans as soon as it knew you had some extra funds at your disposal.

By writing out answers to “What would I do if I didn’t have this money?” you bring your brain back to reality. It reminds you of the routine that’s worked very well for you up to this point, and it reminds you that you don’t need to upend everything just because you got a check.

If you didn’t have the money you would probably…

• Show up at my job, like every Monday.

• Continue saving money.

• Not splurge on $1,000+ things, but buy normal things.

• Not change where you’re living.

• Not change your spending habits at all.

• Continue looking for other opportunities.

Writing this list reminds you of all the things that don’t need to change just because you got paid. From here, from reality, you can well-conceived good plans for what you want to do with the money, for which you can write out a potentially much more exciting list.