Financial Self-Care Is the Gift We Need Most This Holiday Season
As the final weeks of the holiday season approaches, financial stress often hides behind festive lights and full calendars. Overspending expectations, family obligations, and the pressure to create a “perfect” holiday can quietly drain both bank accounts and emotional energy. For many people, money stress doesn’t start in January, it starts now.
That reality was front and center during Dimensional Wealth’s recent Financial Self-Care workshop, presented by Jaelyn Vickery, CFT™, at the Champaign Public Library as part of its Money Matter$ series. The session offered a timely perspective shift of how we approach money during one of the most emotionally charged times of the year.
Rather than focusing solely on budgets or spending limits, Jaelyn introduced financial self-care as a practice rooted in peace, boundaries, and balance. Financial self-care recognizes that money decisions are rarely just mathematical. They are emotional, relational, and deeply connected to our sense of safety and self-worth.
Why the Holidays Quietly Wreck Our Relationship With Money
During the session, participants explored how holiday money stress often shows up beneath the surface: anxiety when checking bank accounts, guilt spending, avoidance, irritability, and burnout. Many people feel pressure to give more than they can afford or to maintain a “perfect holiday,” even when their finances are stretched thin.
Data shared during the workshop made the issue impossible to ignore. One in three people go into debt every holiday season (CNBC, 2025), and nearly 26% of individuals still haven’t paid off credit card debt from the previous holiday season (MSN, 2025). This means many people enter the new year already behind—financially and emotionally—before January even begins.
Jaelyn emphasized that this cycle isn’t about irresponsibility. It’s about emotional overload. When money stress combines with exhaustion, comparison, and people-pleasing, impulsive spending often becomes a coping mechanism rather than a conscious choice.
Financial Clarity Creates Financial Confidence
At the heart of the workshop was a simple but powerful message: money clarity creates money confidence. Through practical tools and reflective exercises, participants were guided to better understand their money mindset. Those automatic financial beliefs and habits often learned early in life that still influence spending and saving today.
By identifying personal patterns and designing intentional systems, individuals can move away from reactive decisions and toward aligned ones. Financial self-care, as Jaelyn explained, is not about restriction. It’s about choosing peace over pressure and intention over obligation.
The workshop reinforced a guiding principle of Dimensional Wealth’s work: intentional spending creates intentional joy. When finances support well-being instead of stress, money becomes a tool for stability rather than a source of shame or anxiety.
The Best Gift Is Financial Safety and Peace of Mind
Through financial therapy and financial coaching, Dimensional Wealth LLC helps individuals and couples build both emotional safety and financial structure. Financial therapy focuses on healing the emotional relationship with money, while financial coaching provides practical strategies to manage it with clarity and confidence.
As the year comes to a close, Dimensional Wealth invites individuals to reconsider what the “perfect gift” really is. More spending and more pressure often lead to more stress. Financial clarity and financial safety, on the other hand, are gifts that last far beyond the holidays.
Whether for yourself or for someone you love, investing in financial self-care is an investment in peace of mind.
To learn more about financial therapy and coaching services with Jaelyn Vickery and Dimensional Wealth, click the button below and take the first step toward building wealth with wellness.
