What is Your Relationhip With Money by Deb Holder
The key to building wealth is about more than just changing your spending habits. The fundamental ingredient to getting out of debt and staying out of debt is to change your relationship with money.
What does money mean to you? Security? Happiness? Love? For most of us, the true meaning of currency goes deeper than a simple word or two. Money has an intrinsic meaning that isn’t always easily defined at first glance. In fact, most of us develop our relationship with money during childhood. The way our parents dealt with money as we were growing up has a direct effect on how we spend it today. If you have a dysfunctional relationship with cash, the first step to financial recovery is to learn what money really means to you.
For Cheri, money represented love. When she was a child, her parents showered her with gifts instead of telling her how much they loved her. Every time her father handed her money or her mother bought her a gift, Cheri felt loved. As she grew up, the acquisition of material things became a substitute for the warmth and nurturing she craved. It’s no surprise that by the time she hit her mid-twenties, she was overwhelmed by credit card debt. Even though she had a strong relationship with her boyfriend and a great job, she still needed to buy things to feel loved. In essence, stuff equaled happiness, but she could never buy enough stuff to fill the emotional void. Debt did have a huge pay-off for her, though. Every time she got into debt her father came to the rescue, and she felt loved again. It became an endless cycle.
Lisa, on the other hand, was told by her father that she would never amount to anything or have two nickels to rub together. That message stuck with her, and she was determined to be more than her father predicted. She became ultra-frugal and didn’t feel secure unless she had a sizeable savings account. By the time she was in her early twenties, she had more than thirty thousand dollars in the bank. In fact, Lisa only felt safe if she could pay for something in cash. Because she grew up poor, she developed a scarcity mindset about money. Lisa saw money as a limited commodity, and she couldn’t have enough of it to feel secure.
Many people think that saving money is about willpower. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Your ability to become debt-free and financially solvent is all about your innermost feelings about money. Many of us don’t even understand what those feelings mean unless we really think about our earliest perceptions about money. Once you know the answer, you can take that first step forward to solving your money problems.
