How to transform a tragic money-story into a jubilant one

Your money story is one of the most personal things about you.

Your relationship with money is one of your core relationships because it’s one of the few that are with you for life – it’s also closely tied to how you value yourself as a person.

The three things you’ll want to have a constructive relationship with are: money, food and you.

Those three remain relatively constant even when other stuff in life comes and goes.

So, if you haven’t before, now is the perfect time to take a look at the story you tell yourself about what you can and cannot have.

What is a money story?

It’s your personal narrative about money, wealth and abundance.

It’s made up of your beliefs, opinions and feelings about money.

It affects your financial decisions. It also affects decisions you make involving your personal worth.

Your money story gets its start when you’re a child. It’s influenced by the culture and traditions you grow up with, and “lives” in your subconscious mind.

Your subconscious mind is that powerful secondary system that runs most things in your life.

It’s like a data bank for everything that isn’t kept in your conscious mind.

Your beliefs, previous experiences, memories, everything you’ve experienced exists in your subconscious mind.

Even when you don’t remember something, your subconscious typically does. And retracing the steps from how you currently make decisions to where they originate in your subconscious mind can be a bitch of a process because that path is never linear.

Why knowing your money story matters.

Doing the inner work is hard, but it’s worth it because it will help you understand why you feel the way you do.

The point of doing the inner work is to connect the dots.

Once you do that, you can decide if feeling a certain way about something is how you want to keep feeling about it or if it’s time to change it.

I had a friend who used to immediately spend any cash she got her hands on. The same day or, at the latest, the following day, the cash would be gone.

She used to laugh about it, excuse herself by saying that it wasn’t usually a substantial amount of money.

But as an adult, she struggled to save money, even though she made a nice income. And she really wanted to save money to buy a house.

After delving into the reasons behind her seeming inability to save money, she came to the conclusion that she was so bad at saving money because she hadn’t updated her money story.

As a child, whenever she’d get some money (i.e. birthdays, holidays etc.) she’d immediately spend it because if she didn’t, her older sister would bully her until she gave away what money she’d got. So, saving it was never an option for her.

Either she quickly spent it, or it’d disappear.

Once she figured out what the root-cause of her impulsive spending was, she could look at it for what it truly was.

She could let go of that idea that she was simply bad at saving money and rewrite her story to better match who she wanted to be today.

She was eventually able to turn her money story around and begin saving for that house.

What’s the start of your money story?

Not all money stories are bad.

Your childhood money story could have instilled in you a deep joy about money, a sense that it will reward your hard work.

Just like all your long-held beliefs, your mythology around money starts in childhood. And the only way to uncover it is to look back and process what you remember with a fresh, more mature perspective.

Jean Chatzky stresses that your core memories aren’t the things your parents tried to teach you about money, instead, they’re the little nuances that you observed, themes and habits that ran in the background of everyday life.

And what you witnessed became your truth.

Chatzky helps you clarify your memories with these questions:

1. What was the feeling about money like in the home where you grew up?
2. What was the feeling like about spending money?
3. What was the feeling like about saving money?
4. What was the feeling like about giving money away?
5. What’s your earliest money memory?
6. What messages did your mother pass down to you about money? (Note: messages differ from lessons, like how to balance a chequebook.)
7. What messages did your father pass down to you about money?
8. Do you remember hearing your parents talk about (or fight about) money?
9. Growing up, did you have more than/less than/about the same as your peers?

Questions like these can be complicated to answer. The process of retrieving those answers isn’t always comfortable either.

But doing the work is worth it because it sets you on a new, better path.

Once you’ve answered the above questions, you can evaluate your answers based on the following criteria:

1. How is this affecting me today?
2. How is this helping me?
3. How is this hurting me?

What impacts your money story?

People’s feelings about money, along with scarcity and abundance, usually fall into four primary attitude buckets.

These money scripts were developed in a 2011 research study by Brad Klontz and his research team. The four belief systems are…

1. Money avoidance – People believe that they do not deserve money. They may believe that wealthy people are greedy or corrupt. They often think that there is virtue in living with less money. Money avoidance can be associated with trying not to think about money. These kinds of thinkers may ignore financial statements. Money avoiders may sabotage their financial success. 
2. Money worship – People feel that money is the key to all happiness, that it can solve any problem. “This mindset leads people to believe that money is the end goal. In the quest for accumulating wealth as rapidly as possible, people are left with an empty void since there will never be “enough” money to meet their ever-changing wants. Money worship takes retail therapy to heart by seeking to buy new things to bring a sense of happiness, purpose, and meaning. The problem is money can’t buy happiness, and this habit ends up leaving people miserable and in debt.”
3. Money status – Closely linked to money worship, money status confuses net worth and self-worth. A perfect example is the “Keeping Up with the Joneses” mentality. People overspend to maintain a lifestyle they can’t afford to impress others.
4. Money vigilance – This script involves people approaching their financial lives with swift practicality, logic, and thoughtfulness. Money vigilance tends to mean people view money as a byproduct of hard work, discipline, and frugality. This script is considered the most financially stable and healthy of the four. Yet, money vigilance can sometimes lead to fear over one’s financial future, leading to anxiety and a lack of balance between spending and saving.

What are your money blocks?

Another piece of your money story are the limiting beliefs you carry about money. They form a story you tell yourself and that story shapes your relationship and actions with money.

Limiting beliefs are thoughts, opinions that one believes to be the absolute truth. They tend to have a negative impact on one’s life by stopping them from moving forward and growing.

Some common money blocks are…

• I’m bad with money
• There’s never enough money for everything
• You have to work hard for money
• Money can’t buy happiness
• I don’t make enough for it to matter
• I should only spend money on my family, not on myself
• I don’t deserve to have more money
• Only money will make me important
• It’s too hard to save money
• As soon as I get it, it’s gone again
• Only bad people want more money
• People only hang out with me for my money
• Everyone thinks I’m an idiot because of my debt

Getting past your money blocks takes time and careful thought. To do this, it helps to put your logic hat on. Ask yourself, is this 100% true? Most of the time, the answer is no. Another tactic is to find contradicting evidence to the limiting belief. 

This will seem clunky and awkward at first, but as with anything, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Pick your money block apart, piece by piece, exposing it for a lie, acknowledge the lie, and forgiving yourself for believing it in the past.

Why women need to share their financial success.

Jamie Kern Lima, founder of IT Cosmetics who sold her company to L’Oréal for $1.2 billion, reveals a painful truth in her book Believe It: women have been taught to hide our victories. “I was taught to feel uncomfortable talking about my actual success without feeling boastful. And I was definitely taught that you never discuss financial success and that anything to do with wealth should be kept as private and discreet as medical records.”

When Forbes approached her for their Richest Self-Made Women list, she felt torn between pride and shame. “Why was I so torn between feeling proud to be on the list on one hand and so embarrassed, mortified, and basically ashamed that I might come across as arrogant or showy on the other?” We’ve learned to bond over our struggles — gaining weight, financial stress, career setbacks — while hiding our wins. “We bond over our perceived problems and weaknesses, not over our victories.”

But here’s her game-changing realisation: “The more she succeeds, the more space and opportunity there is for me to succeed. The more we celebrate our own victories and her victory, the more examples are out there for other girls and women to see!” When we see financial success is possible, we can finally imagine it for ourselves. Our silence isn’t humility — it’s keeping ourselves small through people-pleasing.

So the next time someone asks how you afforded that amazing vacation, don’t deflect. Shine your light and teach: “It was hard, but we stopped dining out for four months, and we sold a bunch of items laying around the house that we didn’t need anymore! It was totally worth it to go on that trip!”