In this episode of the 30 Days of Healthy Habits Challenge, Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, introduces Day 17’s habit: performing a small financial action to create a "financial win" and lower financial stress. She explains that financial stress is strongly linked to mental and physical health, and that taking a tiny, manageable step can build confidence, reduce avoidance, and generate momentum for larger financial challenges. Cheryl offers concrete, low‑effort ideas such as canceling unused subscriptions, moving a modest amount of money to savings, paying a lingering bill, or reviewing recent expenses and credit‑card statements. She highlights built‑in tools many credit‑card portals provide for categorizing spending and recommends the Rocket Money app (with a free‑trial link in the show notes) for tracking and identifying savings opportunities. Throughout, she stresses the importance of starting small, aligning the action with the participant’s personal priorities and the three focus areas set at the start of the challenge, and points viewers to study links in the email and tracker for deeper research on the health‑finance connection. The video ends with encouragement to take one simple step today and a reminder to return for tomorrow’s habit.
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Hello everyone. I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow. And today is day 17 of the 30 Days of Healthy Habits Challenge. So today is an interesting one, and I think it's one that people don't always think about when you're thinking about your health and wellness, but it is actually so important, especially for your mental health and just for overall wellbeing. And that is today's habit, which will be to do a small financial win. So this could be anything really, just a small money action that's going to lower your financial stress because financial stress is really linked strongly to mental and physical health. And taking a small action can help build confidence and reduce the stress of avoidance. Cuz a lot of people don't do financial stuff because it's like they just don't wanna think about it. They don't wanna take the time to deal with it. They think if they ignore it, it'll just go away, something like that. But you can have this tiny win today that will create some momentum and make make bigger challenges feel less overwhelming. Is it like anything else? Like all of these habits we've talked about, you gotta start small and build on it. So to make it easy, here's some few options and examples of things you might do. One might be to cancel a subscription that you're no longer using. That'll save you maybe $10 a month, $20 a month, something like that. The streaming services have all got us crazy lately cuz everything you wanna watch is on a totally different channel. Uh, so take a good look at that and maybe consider paring that down. You might move $10, $20, $100 to your savings account, uh, pay a bill that you've been putting off, uh, review an account, maybe review your expenses for the whole month, or review your expenses for the week, uh, review your credit card bill. Really just take time to actually look at it and see where your money is going. There's actually, uh, some good tools in most of the credit card, uh, things. If you log onto your account online, it'll kind of break it down into categories like, you know, bills and utilities. You might be looking at Amazon specifically. It'll give you the whole amount that that has. If you look at whatever card that you have, it tends to have some good tools along with that that can show you how you're managing your finances or where you're spending. And then noticing once you see where you're spending, that's how you have been able to like create one of these small wins. See if there's something that you can eliminate or something that you can change. Also an app that I've been testing out lately, I believe it's called Rocket Money, but I'll, um, I think I have a link for now for a free trial period or something like that, but I'll find that and put that link in the show notes for you. But it's just a nice tool that can help you keep track of some of these things and give you some ideas on how to, you know, look, start looking at your finances a little bit more critically. You don't wanna do a big overhaul here. Don't get into a whole thing about, you know, doing a grand evaluation of everything that you're spending, everything you're doing. Try to just identify something that's simple. Some of the things I mentioned, maybe it's like skipping your $7 Starbucks for the morning, something like that. For a lot of people that can really add up, but like we're just trying it for one day today and just giving a little bit of attention to this. You can see if it's something that is alignment with your priorities that you set at the beginning of the challenge, those 3 focus areas, you know, depending on what those are, Your finances could be a really big part of that and part of the big key to keeping those moving in the direction that you want to move them. So as always, the links for the studies will be in the email and in your tracker. And so if you're interested in diving a little more deeply into this, you can find those links there. And like I said, it's strongly related to mental and physical health. A lot more people, a lot more than people really realize. So taking a look at your finances and having the small win today, where can you cut back a little or where can you save something for your future will be a nice little mental uplift. So that is the habit for today, and I will see you again tomorrow.
