The Absolute Chaos That Led to This Discovery
Man, I was a mess a few months back. I was making decent money, but I felt like I was constantly chasing my tail. Every bill felt like a slap in the face. I was spending cash on random stuff, trying to fill some vague hole in my schedule or my emotional state. I knew I needed to stop the bleeding, but traditional budgeting advice just made me feel restricted and miserable.
I’m a Virgo, and I’ve always followed Jessica Lanyadoo. Not because I’m fully into the woo-woo stuff, but because she’s always talking about self-accountability and psychological deep dives. Her horoscopes are like therapy sessions. So, in a moment of utter desperation—when I should have been opening my banking app—I fired up my browser and typed that exact title in, looking for some kind of cosmic permission slip to chill out.
The Practice Begins: Hunting for Subtext
I started reading the weekly Virgo forecast, expecting the usual guidance about routines or health. But then I noticed it. Lanyadoo rarely just talks about “money.” She constantly uses the words “resources,” “worth,” “value,” and “security.” And suddenly, it hit me: my financial chaos was just a symptom of a larger resource management problem.
I decided to turn this aimless searching into a concrete project. I didn’t just read my sign; I went back through three months of her weekly and monthly summaries for all twelve signs. I created a terrible, ugly spreadsheet—no fancy software, just basic rows—and I copied and pasted every single sentence that related to self-worth, boundaries, spending, or feeling secure. It was a tedious process, but I was determined to distill something practical from all that cosmic talk.
What I discovered was shocking, and it had nothing to do with whether Mercury was retrograde. I realized that the core financial advice hidden in all those forecasts boiled down to three very blunt, actionable things:
- Stop Leaking Energy: Where are you giving away your time, which you could be using to earn, rest, or focus?
- Align Spending with Actual Value: Are you buying things because they genuinely make your life better, or because you’re scared of missing out?
- Defend Your Resources: Set boundaries around who can access your time and your cash.
I moved from the research phase right into the testing phase. I treated my emotional reactions as the real data points, not just the dollar amounts.
The Immediate Implementation: Setting Up Financial Walls
The biggest and most immediate shift I forced myself to make was boundary enforcement. I realized I was constantly hemorrhaging small amounts of cash through people-pleasing. Friends always needing to “borrow” ten dollars, colleagues relying on me to cover things, or me just volunteering to pay for stuff to avoid confrontation.
The Lanyadoo analysis—specifically her consistent push to “honor your needs”—gave me the backbone I lacked. I started practicing saying no. It felt aggressive at first. A friend asked me to chip in for an extravagant gift for a distant acquaintance. Old me would have automatically sent fifty bucks. New me, backed by my messy research notes, just said, “Sorry, that doesn’t fit my resource management plan right now.”
I tracked the emotional residue of that refusal. It was momentarily uncomfortable, but the feeling of having defended my bank account felt more powerful than the temporary guilt. This simple act of refusal, spurred by reading esoteric advice, started showing up on my bottom line almost instantly.
Another thing I put into immediate practice was the “Time Buffer.” Before I bought anything over thirty bucks that wasn’t a necessity, I physically walked away from the item or closed the browser window. I set a mandatory six-hour cooling-off period. Most of the time, that impulse disappeared, and I logged the saved money as a “Boundary Win.”
The Best Money Advice Summarized (The Practical Takeaway)
My journey started with looking for a vague spiritual tip and ended with concrete, psychological financial management. This wasn’t about finding a magic lottery number; it was about stopping my own self-sabotage.
If you jumped into the same research rabbit hole, here is the synthesized, no-nonsense financial wisdom I extracted and implemented:
- Define Your Worth: Stop trying to impress people with your spending. Only buy things that genuinely improve your quality of life, not your perceived status. I literally wrote down my definition of ‘rich’—it wasn’t millions; it was having a three-month buffer and time off.
- Audit Your Leaks: Physically identify people, subscriptions, or activities that drain your time and energy without giving you a proportionate return. I ruthlessly cut three subscriptions I hadn’t touched in months and dumped a coffee meetup that always left me feeling drained.
- The Fear Check: Every time you make a major purchase, verbally articulate the emotion driving it. Is it fear of scarcity, fear of rejection, or genuine appreciation? If it’s fear, walk away.
I’m nowhere near perfect, but by taking a bizarre starting point—astrology analysis—and forcing it into a practical framework, I stopped being a victim of my own wallet. Turns out, the best money advice is usually just good advice about self-respect, repackaged.
