Personal finance is often viewed in terms of numbers. It makes sense on the surface, because things like making a budget, figuring out how much time it will take to get out of debt, balancing the checkbook, etc., all involve wading through columns of numbers.

But the thing is, personal finance isn’t really as much about numbers as it is about your relationship to those numbers.

You are not a Vulcan, so expecting things to add up or work out exactly the way they do on paper is unrealistic.

Emotions, and our surroundings, are going to affect us.

Think of how differently an item that’s for sale makes you feel depending on where it’s located. Seeing a bracelet in the window of Cartier is different from seeing it laying in a heap on a table at a garage sale. Yet it could be exactly the same bracelet.

If you try to leave emotion out of your finances, you’re likely to end up in worse shape than if you had factored it in in the first place.

So make it a point to consider your emotions — along with how you’ve acted and reacted in the past, and how you are likely to act and react in the future — when it comes to your finances.