Don’t Wait for the Asteroid: Why You Have to Face the Music About Money NOW

Key Takeaways

• Avoidance is the real financial asteroid; the longer you ignore money, the more dangerous it becomes.

• A Shame Audit exposes the habits you’d rather hide and gives you a place to start.

• Progress doesn’t take hours, it takes ten minutes.

The Excuse Factory

It’s your fault you feel stressed about money. Not your boss’s fault, not society’s, not the government’s. Yours. It’s the trauma-soaked, casual avoidance that got you here. You don’t know how much you spend. You know you should pay more attention to your investments. You know you should save more. And yet, you don’t.

Why? Because life gets in the way. There’s a new job, a new illness, a new relationship, a new headache. It’s Monday, it’s Friday, it’s early in the year, it’s late in the year. I’ve heard it all. These are all excuses. Excuses to push your most basic duty to your future self onto an endless to-do list. Maybe you’ve been reading this newsletter for a few months now and have been very close to making moves, but you haven’t for some reason.

Sorry babe, it’s you. I say this with love, because I’ve been there too. But the harsh truth is this: to function and maybe even be happy as an adult, you need a working knowledge of how you make, spend, and invest your money. No one can do it for you. You can hire help, but you still have to do some homework.

The Deer in the Headlights

I’m fascinated by the sheer willpower people put into avoiding thinking about money. At a party recently, I told a group of smart, creative, enviably employed people what I do for a living (for those of you new here, I run a financial advisory business). Cue the deer-in-the-headlights look. One woman announced, almost proudly, “I do all the spending but my husband does the other money stuff. I just don’t have the head for it. But I trust him.”

DOES HE KNOW WHAT HE’S DOING? REALLY? How would she know? What if he got caught in a crypto scam and hid it out of shame? What if all their money sat in cash in a brokerage account for a decade? I’ve seen both of these things happen more times than I’d like to admit.

I get it. Life gets in the way. Updating your résumé for that killer job or picking up your kid from the dentist might be more urgent tonight than checking your 401(k) allocation. But if you let avoidance go on for too long, you risk losing far more than missing out on a dream job or being a few minutes late to an appointment.

The Asteroid Problem

Picture this: a massive asteroid is hurtling toward Earth. Every scientist is screaming that action must be taken. News anchors are chain-smoking on live TV. And you, heroic protagonist, stand up and say, “I hear you. But I’ll deal with this after we get back from Chicago.”

No one in a disaster movie acts like that. The asteroid is coming. You move now, or you’re toast.

Yet this is exactly how most people treat their finances. Except the “asteroid” isn’t a single crash. It’s something that happens over time. It’s erosion, neglect. The slow degradation of what could have been a thriving garden into a weed-ridden lot. The disasters come later, when you’re laid off in a recession, or your marriage unravels, or you’re hit with a lawsuit. By then, it’s too late to build defenses.

The Real Threat: Inertia

In reality, financial collapse usually starts small. An email about your 401(k) enrollment deadline. A pleading email from your accountant to upload your tax documents. A slowly developing habit of ordering Seamless four nights a week. You tell yourself you’ll handle it after the big project, after the trip, after life “calms down.”

Spoiler: life never calms down. Asteroids cannot be rescheduled.

The truth is, most financial lives don’t implode—they corrode through procrastination. Missed deadlines. Compounding debt. Untapped employer matches. Forgotten bills. Your asteroid is inertia, and it’s just as destructive as space debris.

The Shame Audit

So what should you do? Stop waiting for the magical week when you’ll be responsible. That person doesn’t exist. Instead, figure out where your avoidance comes from. Start with a Shame Audit. Write down the three money behaviors you least want to admit. Late fees. An untouched retirement account. A five-figure AMEX bill. One of those things is your starting point.

Shame fuels avoidance, so the purpose of a Shame Audit isn’t just to add to your to-do list, but to drag your avoidance into daylight, so that it loses its grip on you.

One item from my Shame Audit is medical bills. They show up by email, text, and snail mail, demanding I pay thousands I don’t actually owe. Or at least, I’m pretty sure I don’t owe the full amount, but one can never be sure. The thought of calling the insurance company again makes me want to vanish, so I avoided settling these bills. But once I named and recognized that shame, it shrank. And then I asked for help from someone who wasn’t so emotionally connected to the bills. Once you identify the shame, lean on someone to help you through it, perhaps a spouse or a sister if you have one of those.

Ten Minutes to Start

Once you do your Shame Audit, you can begin to chip away. Ten minutes at a time. Set a timer. Log into one account. Look at one balance. Pay one bill. That’s it. The point isn’t to finish—it’s to prove you can begin. And beginning is the only way to build momentum.

Your financial asteroid is real. But the escape plan isn’t cinematic. It’s dull, repetitive, almost boring. You make a shame list. You set a ten-minute timer. These are the small steps that will compound until your financial garden grows again. And if you fall off the wagon, start over. Ten minutes is always enough.

Parting shot: the asteroid is already in the sky. The only real question is whether you’re willing to look up.

If you need more fuel for this, go back and read: