How to manage your finances like an Olympian

Sarah Coles

The Olympics is under way, with incredible athletes from around the world pushing themselves to the limit in the pursuit of sporting excellence.

For the rest of us, for whom the limit of our sporting excellence is running for a bus, you’d be forgiven for thinking that these Olympians have nothing to do with our lives, but their example can teach us five valuable lessons about our finances.

Olympians were traditionally amateurs, and while this rule was dropped in the 1980s, for decades, competitors were juggling their training alongside their jobs (and some still do).

We might tell ourselves we’re too exhausted to get anything done after a long day at work, but they came home and then trained to be the best in the world at something. If you’ve been putting off any financial admin, from shopping around for a better savings account to rebalancing your investments, you have no excuse but to find the time and get it sorted.

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Set goals – but break them down

Olympians will set the competition as their ultimate goal, but they have four years to hit their peak. They don’t start on day one, focusing on the day of competition. They work out where they need to be, and then break it down into manageable steps, and hit every goal along the way.

The same goes for your financial goals. It can be off-putting to think that you need to save enough cash to cover three to six months’ worth of essentials, because it’s difficult to see how you’re going to amass thousands of pounds.

However, if you plan to free up anything you can afford today, and increase your savings when you get a pay rise, you can map out a route to building your savings that feels far more manageable.

Olympians don’t train alone. As well as other athletes, they’ll work with trainers, nutritionists, and specialists to help them with every aspect of their sport.

There’s no need for you to get on top of money matters on your own either. You can team up with a friend and take steps to improve your financial lives together.

You can also call on professionals if you need them, from financial advisers to counsellors from debt charities. You don’t have to feel like you’re in this on your own.

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Every Olympian will compete at their first Olympics at some point in their career, and that step into the unknown can be terrifying. However, to succeed, they can’t let fear stop them in their tracks.

The unknown is intimidating in our financial lives too. It’s why so many people shy away from stepping into areas like investment.

However, often once they’ve made a start, they’ll be shocked at how straightforward it is to learn about, and how quickly they can get up to speed. All it takes is overcoming the initial fear.

This is far easier said than done, but if you can make good money habits part of your life in the same way as an Olympian makes training part of the routine, you can transform your finances.

This can include everything from checking that your budget is on track at the end of the day to checking your savings accounts are still competitive every couple of months, and revisiting your pension contributions each year to see if you’re on track for retirement.

You don’t need to be as relentlessly disciplined as an Olympian, you just need to develop good habits, and they’ll do the hard work for you.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.

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