Let’s be honest—the last couple of years have been hard on everyone. We’ve all had our lives disrupted in big and small ways thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, and as 2020 has turned into 2021 and now 2022, it’s safe to say that most of us could use a break from the stress in our lives.

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to lower your stress, from exercising more to taking time to meditate to just getting more sleep every night. You can even take a few financial steps to help you reduce the stress in your life.

Give Yourself a Goal to Look Forward To

When you’re under stress, one of the best things you can do is to give yourself something to look forward to. There’s nothing wrong with looking forward to small things, like watching a movie over the weekend. However, having a major event you’re looking forward to, like buying something you’ve always wanted or taking a trip somewhere nice, can really help take your mind off your problems.

Of course, buying something nice or traveling somewhere nice is a financial goal, and like other financial goals, you’ll want to make it a SMART goal to boost your odds of achieving it. You can even use our SMART goal kit to figure out how to make your goal a SMART goal and track your progress toward it.

Get started setting financial goals today! 

Invest in a Hobby

Hobbies are a great way to relieve stress on a day-to-day basis. Studies have shown that even spending as little as 20 minutes a day on a hobby can leave you feeling happier and less stressed.

Of course, most hobbies usually require you to invest some money into them, whether it’s for cooking ingredients, lockpicks or even running shoes. While you can always put the money you budget each month for entertainment toward your hobby, you might also want to consider creating a separate budget category for your hobby. If you review your budget monthly, you can use that time to see how much you’ve spent on your hobby and use that information to determine whether you should make your hobby a separate budget item.

Get Rid of Your Debts

While we can’t just get rid of COVID-induced stress, we can get rid of other areas of stress in our life, and one of the biggest sources of stress for most people is their debt load. Admittedly, a lot of people aren’t able to pay back their debts immediately, but even if you can’t eliminate your debts completely you can still take steps to reduce the amount of interest you owe and potentially lower your monthly payments.

One of the best ways to do this is to get a debt consolidation loan. This not only lets you combine your monthly payments into one convenient payment, it also gets rid of your multiple interest rates and replaces them with one low interest rate, which ultimately saves you money.

As an added bonus, once you get your debts paid off, you can use the money you were using to pay them off and apply it to other goals you might have, such as your financial goals or your hobbies.

Start paying off your debts today!

Reduce Your Stress With First Alliance Credit Union

Most of us are more stressed than we’ve been in quite some time. However, there are ways you can reduce your stress level, whether it’s giving yourself something to look forward to, investing in a hobby or even by paying off some debts.

You should also know that First Alliance Credit Union offers a lot of tools to make these steps easier. In addition to storing money for your financial goals in a traditional savings account, you can also use the My Money tool in our online banking platform to make creating a budget easier. You can even talk with one of our member experience advisors about whether a debt consolidation loan might be a good option for you.