At my worst, I couldn't look at the full picture of my finances. Not because I didn't know how, I'm a qualified accountant. But because I was frightened of what I might see.
My brain had a habit of filling the gaps. Miss a payment, lose the house. Lose the house, lose everything. Within about thirty seconds I'd gone from a cash flow problem to sleeping on the street. I knew it wasn't rational. I couldn't stop it.
What I didn't realise at the time was that the catastrophising wasn't caused by my situation. It was caused by not actually knowing my situation. The gaps were the problem. My imagination was doing what imaginations do when they don't have facts to work with.
The moment I finally sat down and built a complete picture, everything in one place, pension values, property equity, investments, what I owed, what I owned, what it all added up to, the spiral stopped. Not because everything was fine. But because I could see what was actually true rather than what I feared might be.
Most people I talk to in their forties and fifties have never done this. Not properly. They know the individual pieces, pension somewhere, property worth roughly something, some investments, a business maybe. But they've never seen it all in one place, at one moment, as a single coherent picture.
And most of them are avoiding it for exactly the same reason I was. Not laziness. Fear.
The thing is, the picture is almost never as bad as the one your brain invents in the dark at three in the morning. And even when it reveals problems, a real problem with a clear shape is something you can do something about.
That's what the Poreia Clarity Framework exists to do. Give you the picture. The real one.