109: Understand Your Money Story to Have a Healthy Relationship with Money
Your Money Story
Your money story is what impacts how you behave with money. Your money story is nuanced. And is shaped when you are young, by what caregivers did or didn't say about money, how you related to your peers at school and in your community, as you got older and started working to earn money or got an allowance, where you did or didn’t attend higher education, and what your first 1099 or 1-2 paycheck looked like.
The most impactful stories and shaping happen when we are young, and our brains do most of their development. And we aren’t necessarily expressing ourselves verbally, we are often experiencing the world emotionally. This means we pick up our beliefs about money in feelings and via emotions.
Your money story shapes your beliefs about debt, spending, saving, and investing. It shapes what you think is “good” to do or not do with money. What you think a “safe” job is. How you secretly (or not so secretly) judge how others spend their money. How you do–or don’t–merge and manage finances if you are partnered.
In Episode 107 of the Mind Money Balance podcast, I talked about scarcity mindset. When talking about scarcity mindset, there is a lot of personal blame and shame that sounds like “you have a poverty mindset” or “your money story is rooted in scarcity.” Instead, I want to invoice you to have a compassionate and nuanced view of your relationship with money.
Money Story Examples
There are so many examples of money stories and how they show up. As I learn best through examples, I wanted to share a few (made up, but definitely relatable) different money story examples so you can get an idea of how they show up in our lives.
The person who spends with abandon because they grew up in a household where money was a non-issue. They had access to money, got an allowance at a young age, and when they broke or damaged things as they grew up, those items magically got replaced. The money story there was “things will always get taken care of.” And while that story is very soothing and reassuring, it didn’t come with a caveat like “things are taken care of financially because we prioritize saving and living below our means” or “because we have the privilege of earning high wages in a low cost of living area.”
Or a person who is so anxious to spend and has tens of thousands of dollars in savings account because they are terrified of investing and making a mistake. A money story they inherited from their single working parent was, “it’s important to have money available; you need to take care of yourself financially, don’t depend on others.”
Or the person who is in debt but feels guilty and ashamed by it. Instead of telling their partner about it, they keep it to themselves, trying to figure out ways to earn more and pay off the debt, but the story and the hiding eats away at them. Their money story might sound like “it’s important to take care of everything. Debt is bad. Figuring things out on your own is a virtue”
Emotions Around Money
Our emotions around money range from negative to positive. So many financial scenarios can be beneficial when you engage with your positive or neutral money emotions! I encourage my clients to think about money and emotions working together in alignment instead of keeping them separate. Positive financial and emotional alignment is what happens when you feel neutral or positive emotions around financial behaviors. Think: logging into your checking account and being excited about what you see. Or feeling optimistic about the pace of debt paydown.
To help you get curious about your emotions around money, here are a few questions you can ask yourself if you are struggling to cultivate a healthy relationship with money:
What if you thought about what lessons are or aren’t worth keeping around?
What about softening your money story?
What about extending some compassion to yourself?
Healthy Relationship With Money
Now that you have a better idea of what your money story is, and what emotions come up when you engage with your money, it’s time to make sure your relationship with money is healthy. A healthy relationship with money means having an understanding of your finances, a plan or goals for what to do next, and practicing regular money habits so you can feel good about where you are financially now, and where you want to be financially in the future.
Of course, financial literacy is important, but feeling good about your money helps you to remain consistent in healthy engagement with your money.
What’s Your Current Money Type?
One of my favorite first steps to understanding your money story is to dig into your financial archetype. Your money archetype can help you see yourself and how you relate to money and helps you see both the strengths and shadows of how your money shows up. To take the quiz, head to mindmoneybalance.com/quiz
-
This is the last podcast episode in this series around feeling better about things that get a bad rap in the money world, like a kinder take on things like scarcity mindset and the recession. And today we're finishing off the series for August with how to understand your money story and have a healthy relationship with money. Without all the guilt and shame that comes along with a lot of folks in the financial creator space or in the money mindset space.
Before I dive into today's episode, I totally forgot to tell you all that I am going to be speaking at FinCon in just a couple of weeks. FinCon is an annual conference where financial content creators and money brands kind of get together and figure out ways to be more accessible for their audience and for their clients. And it is a way to learn both about like the how-to's of money and also to learn about the how-to's of growing a practice if you're in the money space, and I will be talking on Saturday, September the 10th about financial anxiety and why financial creators need to have an understanding of what it is and how understanding what it is, can actually make them, in my opinion, better content creators and also help to cultivate healthier relationships with their existing clients and in generating new clients. Right. I think if I have not made it abundantly clear, I believe that our relationship with money is so important. And of course, financial literacy matters. But having a healthy relationship with money matters so much more. And if you're a money creator in any way, shape, or form, I would love to see you there. Please come say hi to me, if you already have your ticket, and you're going to be there. Again, I'll be speaking on Saturday about financial anxiety about how it shows up and about why it matters to content creators. So if you're interested, you can Google FinCon 2022. And if you want to get a discount, you can enter MindMoney10 That's MindMoney10 to get $10 off of your past. So come say hi and email me if you got a ticket. And then we can kind of coordinate a little meetup. Cool.
All right, let's get into your money story. So just like I talked about in episode 107, on scarcity versus abundance mindset, the theme here is nuance right? So your money story is how you think about money. And of course, it's shaped when you are young, by what your caregivers did or didn't say about money, how you related to peers at school and in your community. And as you got older and started working to earn money, or maybe got an allowance, it was impacted by where you did or didn't attend higher education and what your first job looked like and whether it was 1099, or you were an employee and how you dealt with all of that. But the most impactful kind of money stories and shaping of our money stories happens when we're young and our brains are doing the bulk of their development. So for my early childhood folks out there, you know, that our brains are working in overtime when we are quite young. And when we are kind of growing. So think about like elementary school age, we're not necessarily expressing ourselves verbally, though. I mean, of course we are. Hopefully we are talking by that point in time. But we're really experiencing the world through emotions through feelings, which means that it makes perfect sense that we relate to money through emotions and through feelings. We don't necessarily learn about tax rates and compound interest at a young age, but we certainly know what it feels like to walk into a room and know that maybe your caregivers were just arguing about money, or the discomfort that might happen if your grandparent took you out to eat and their credit card was declined. Right? We know what that feeling is without having to put it into words. And so it's so important as we dig into our money story in a more shame-free way that we make sure not just to think about the nuts and bolts of what was happening financially, but also about how we felt. And as I mentioned at the top of this episode, there's so much blame and shame that happens in the personal finance and money mindset communities about your money story, and they say things like well, you have a poverty mindset because of your money story, which is so harmful, or Your money story is rooted in scarcity, go back and listen to 107 for my take on that, and how we can be a bit gentler to ourselves. So let me kind of share some examples of how different money stories can show up just to kind of help you to see how it might be showing up for you or for a loved one in your world. And of course, these are not based on real people, but they might feel familiar because we all have money stories, we all have relationships with money. So let me talk about a few to help kind of paint a picture here for many stories.
So let's think about the person who spends with abandon, they spend very freely, they're definitely that free spirit archetype. And when we think about why they might do this, there could be a number of reasons. But for this person, let's imagine that they grew up having access to financial privilege, they got an allowance at a young age, if they broke a toy, or damaged things as they grew up, those items magically got replaced or fixed. And so the money story they absorbed as a child was things will always get taken care of. And while that story is very soothing, and reassuring, and probably comes with a lot of safety, it might not have come with the caveat, that was more nuanced, like things are taken care of financially, because we prioritize saving and living below our means, or because we have the financial privilege of earning high wages and living in a low cost area. So this person's money story, they might have gotten Part A which was like, It's okay, we'll be fine financially. But they didn't necessarily get Part B, which is like, because we have some systems in place and some privilege in place to allow us to live in this manner. So for that person who spends to maybe cultivate a healthier relationship with money, we have to think about how can we weave in nuance there. So they can still have that comfort and security that came when they were a child. But it also allows for sustainability, because they learn how to manage their finances. Now let's talk about a person who also has a type of financial privilege, but it's riddled with anxiety, the person who is so anxious to spend, and they have 10s of 1000s of dollars in a plain vanila savings account, because they are terrified of investing within their retirement account or purchasing a home or making some sort of financial mistake. And for them a money story they might have inherited from their single working parent was, it's so important to have money available, you need to be able to take care of yourself financially don't depend on others for money. And so those messages of fierce independence that came from a place of safety, again, we were talking about security in that first example, but safety here, if I have money available, then I will be safe, might make it hard as that person grows up and becomes an adult to actually enjoy the safety that money can afford them. Or the person who is in debt, but feels a lot of guilt and shame by it. And so many people I know, tackle their debt by themselves. They keep it in, they hide it, they tell themselves, I'll deal with it on my own, I'll figure it out on my own. But that that money story, and the subsequent behaviors of maintaining debt and keeping it to themselves really eats away at them that secret is, is a shameful secret because they feel badly about it. And so their money story might sound like it's important for me to take care of, to take care of everything on my own, or debt is bad. And having debt means I'm a bad person, or figuring things out on your own is a virtue. And they might have grown up in a household where maybe money was really secret, it was very private, but they still managed to inherit these messages about debt being bad or wrong. And it might have been because their parent or caregiver stayed out of debt, or it might have been because their parent or caregiver got into trouble with debt. And either way, the message in the story that they inherited was that debt is bad. So when they find themselves having debt, instead of saying, hey, we need to kind of figure things out in their household. They go, Oh my gosh, I've got to figure this out quickly because if my partner finds out then they're gonna find out I'm a bad person, right? They've internalized this idea that having debt is bad. And because they have debt, they're a bad person. They blend those two together.
So when we think about emotions around money and how emotions impact our money story, as I mentioned earlier, we start to make sense of our world emotionally first, so maybe starting to experience and dig into what your current emotions around money are, how do you feel when you log into your bank account? What happens when you have to say, if you're a small business owner to a client, hey, you haven't paid that invoice yet? What about the feelings that come up? When you imagine retirement? Does it come with a lot of relaxation and excitement? Or does it come with a lot of anxiety and worry. And then as you kind of reflect on your money story, I want for you to ask yourself like, Is this my money story? Or is this my family's money story? Are these lessons worth keeping? Are they serving me in some way? Are they helping to create some motivation? Or some responsibility? Or are they causing a lot of harm, both financially and both emotionally? What can you do to extend some compassion to yourself, for how your money story has showed up? And how those emotions have impacted your financial behaviors? Can you soften your money story? And what I mean by that is, if you got a money story that was, you know, it's important to be able to take care of yourself financially. Can we add a little bit of softness to that? Yes, it's important to take care of ourselves financially. And also, it's okay to get financial help, or it's okay to tell my partner what's going on, you know, is there a way to take maybe the helpful parts of that story helpful for you, and weave in some, some compassionate softness, for lack of a better term. And so when it comes to creating a healthy money story, or a healthy relationship with money, I want for you to think about whether or not that money story is helpful in any way. And once you have that down, once you can kind of start unpacking some of these questions that are brought up. I will also have them listed out in the blog post. So you don't have to worry about taking notes. But literally hit pause on this. Look up the the show notes for this episode and take it off 510 15 minutes to journal on some of these questions and see what comes up. Because what I often find with my clients is that they are really good at the financial literacy piece. And what I mean by that is, so many of them will come in and be like, Yeah, I understand what a budget is, Oh, I understand what compound interest is, yes, I know, you know, what makes more sense whether to rent or buy, like they have a lot of these financial literacy answers. I will never downplay the importance of financial literacy. But we have to dig in below that literacy. Because what a lot of my clients are, is they're like, booksmart, financially, but their emotions and their behaviors don't necessarily reflect that. So they can kind of do what we did in school, which is to like, memorize a term and repeat it back to me. But they haven't implemented because their money story gets in the way of them being able to take aligned action with what they need to do. So if you find yourself kind of in that book, smart space, where you're consuming a lot of information about money, but not actually implementing my guess is that your money story somehow is getting in the way. And so by asking yourself some of these questions, I wonder if you can start uncovering your money stories, you can start taking action on that. So instead of just being able to, you know, match a definition to a word, I want for you to be able to actually take action and implement your budget, start contributing to retirement, start calling around, find a lawyer to help you create a will and a trust or whatever it is that's on your financial to do list. And starting to do those things will help to create a positive feedback loop, right? It will start to help you to go oh my gosh, I actually have the capacity to finish those things to do those things. I'm able to do that. And that can help create some positive momentum and help you to start, you know, behaving in a healthy way with money that then can start to reshape your money story to be kinder to yourself. And if you're not really sure where you land on the money story, I would invite you to take my free quiz at MindMoneyBalance.com/Quiz It's a quick quiz that helps you to figure out which of the four money archetypes you're in and these money archetypes help to give you language for why you do what you do. And it doesn't just talk about you know the shadows of your money archetype or the quote unquote bad side of your money archetype but also helps you understand your strengths. And again to take that free quiz go to MindMoneyBalance.com/Quiz
So just to recap here, your money story starts being shaped when you are a child and continues to be more and more solidified as you age as we have different money milestones such as making money making money mistakes, being around people with or without money. The way that we relate to money impacts the way that we can implement our financial literacy, our emotions around money matter and when we first start to learn about anything, we experience the world emotionally. And so if we can ask ourselves questions about our relationship with money from an emotional standpoint, that can help us to cultivate a new, healthier rewritten relationship with money and to create a money story that feels better for where you're at right now. I hope you have enjoyed this series on some of the things that are a little bit scarier in the world of personal finance and that you found them to be reassuring, you know, you're not alone in this. We all have weird shit around money we just do. And so to start untangling some of these, these nuances, some of these black and white terms around like scarcity and abundance or around recessions, or around having a bad money story, it's like we can, it doesn't have to be so fucking intense. Right? We can just extend a little bit more kindness, a little bit more compassion to ourselves for what we're going through. I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you soon.