Radical responsibility is the decision to fully own every part of your financial life, income, spending, debt, and savings, without blaming outside circumstances. For pharmacy professionals managing financial stress, it’s the foundational first step in building lasting financial health.
In the previous article, The Impact of Financial Stress on Pharmacy Professionals, we explored how financial stress affects pharmacy professionals and why taking care of our own financial health helps us better serve our patients.
Recognizing the problem, however, is only the beginning. The Prescription for Financial Health™ is my approach to reducing financial stress and building long-term financial health. Over the next five articles, we’ll explore one important part of that approach: a practical five-step framework you can begin implementing today.
Begin With Step One: Radical Responsibility
Often we know that we want to improve money for our household, but we aren’t sure what steps to take first. Our pharmacy workdays often have processes for dealing with finances like submitting claims, discussing co-pays, and managing the finances of inventory. Yet once we get home, we don’t have a clear plan for taking care of our personal finances.
Today I offer you a step you can take immediately for your household, because it is simply making a decision. And that decision is to take radical responsibility for your finances.
What do I mean by radical responsibility? I mean deciding that your finances are your responsibility. That you will not avoid them, you will take time for them, and you will not focus on blaming financial problems on things outside of your control. You will simply decide today that you are going to be responsible for all aspects of your financial life.
This includes the income flowing into your household, as well as the money flowing out of your household. This includes looking at your debts and looking at your savings. Ultimately, it involves acknowledging your financial behaviors and whether the habits you have are helping you or hurting you.
Why Financial Advocacy Matters for Pharmacy Professionals
We know that patients who take good care of their physical and mental health are those that are good advocates for themselves. They schedule well visits with their physicians and complete their preventative health screenings. They acknowledge problems when they arise and seek help from their medical team when needed. They show up at the pharmacy counter and provide the technicians with accurate information. They pay attention and ask questions when the pharmacist provides counseling. They advocate for their health.
Similarly, we want to be good advocates for our own personal financial health. We want to take time to get our eyes on our money, create habits that are beneficial to our finances, and seek help when we discover a problem.
While inflation may be a concern that we must deal with, we also recognize that we have a lot of agency and choice in our spending. We take time to pause and note that there are lots of places in our daily life where we can have a positive impact on our money.
Know Your Numbers
A patient who knows when their refills are due, knows when they need an appointment, and tracks the details of their health concerns are the patients that succeed in the medical system. If they track daily blood pressures, they can see trends in those readings and their physician can determine if their blood pressure medications are working. If they track their blood sugar and their food intake they can see which foods result in spiked readings on their glucometer.
What Does It Mean to “Know Your Numbers” Financially?
Looking at your money is very similar. If you know your recurring monthly expenses (such as mortgage, utilities), your irregular expenses (like car insurance or a vacation), and keep the details on your spending, you can succeed with your personal finances. Knowing the numbers allows for better decision making, and less guessing.
One of the most common statements I hear from pharmacy professionals is “I just don’t know where my money goes from paycheck to paycheck.” And while that is a common problem, it is one that can be easily fixed. Knowing your numbers is a financial skill that can be practiced at any stage of the financial journey. It just requires us to start looking at the details.
Make Money Visible
With the advent of direct deposit, automatic billing, and tap to pay, money has become invisible in many ways. One of the ways you can take radical responsibility for your money is by making it visible again. I like to call this getting eyes on your money.
This means looking at your paystubs. With direct deposit, many pharmacy professionals can go months or years without ever looking at their paystubs. But radical responsibility means knowing what you are getting paid, how often you are getting paid, and what that take home pay includes. It means knowing what is coming out of your paycheck for benefits, for retirement, or any other deductions that happen.
This means looking at your investments. If you are working somewhere that provides a match to your retirement contributions, it is important to know if you are capturing that extra benefit of additional money. If you have investment accounts, it is knowing what money is invested in inside of those accounts. Investments can include retirement accounts like 401K or 403B or IRAs, but all those examples have specific investments inside of them. Other investments can include 529s for saving for college, or brokerage accounts. But for all accounts, it is valuable to know what you are invested in inside of those accounts. An easy way to find the answer is to look at a statement and read the details.
This means looking at your savings. Having an emergency fund and saving ahead for future spending is good practice for everyone. It also means looking at your expenses. Your money flowing into your bank account may happen once or twice a month if you have a regular paycheck, but the money flowing out of your bank accounts often happens all month long. Finding a way to look at those expenses and decide if they are intentional choices is an important piece of radical responsibility.
There are many budgeting apps these days that can make this step of making money visible easy. They can connect with your accounts and quickly make clear visuals of how your money is flowing in and out of your account. The bonus is that they add up transactions much faster than doing so manually.
But if the learning curve of an app feels like too much right now, you can start getting your eyes on your money just using pen and paper. Writing down your regular monthly expenses, and noting which expenses are needs (food, shelter, transportation) and which expenses are wants (entertainment, shopping, dining out) can be a quick way to get your eyes on your money.
Are You Leaking Money?
When you take time to analyze your expenses you can start to evaluate if you are spending money intentionally in the direction of your values, or if your money is leaking out of your accounts on expenses that don’t feel important to you.
Once you get your eyes on your money it is easy to see those areas where money tends to leak out. Some popular areas for this are subscriptions (perhaps you signed up for the free trial, forgot to cancel, and now it’s been charging you monthly for years), or memberships (joined that gym in January, but months later you realize you haven’t been going).
Cleaning up any money leaks is a great way to practice radical responsibility with your money.
Take Radical Responsibility
If you are ready to take radical responsibility for your finances, decide today how often you will spend looking at your money every week. Even 10-15 minutes per week of getting your eyes on your money can lead to big financial changes. Taking responsibility for your financial health doesn’t mean blaming yourself for past money decisions. It means recognizing that today’s choices have the power to shape tomorrow’s financial future for you and your household.
In our next article, we’ll explore Step Two: Financial Awareness, where you’ll learn why getting your eyes on your money is one of the most powerful ways to reduce financial stress.
