Episode 5 Transcript: The Hidden Money Stories Driving Your Decisions

This month, I want to introduce a theme you may have heard me talk about before, and that is money history. Your money history, and why it matters. Spending time understanding your own history with money and how it shapes the way you think about it, feel about it, and act around money.

One of my favorite quotes about money comes from the philosopher Jacob Needleman. He wrote a book called Money and the Meaning of Life, and in it he says something like, everybody is weird about money. I love that line. What I take it to mean is that we all have quirks, patterns, and emotional reactions when it comes to money.

The way we think about money, the way we use it, the way we avoid it, all of that is shaped by the hundreds or even thousands of messages and voices we have absorbed about money over the course of our lives. Most of us never received any sort of formal education about money growing up. Not how to think about it, not how to use it as a tool, and certainly not how to understand our emotional relationship with it.

So what we are left with are all these little bits and pieces we have picked up along the way. Some of them are helpful. Some of them probably are not. And that is why I think it is really important and valuable to get curious about our own money histories and where we come from with money.

When we explore this with clients, we often reflect using questions like these. What did you learn about money growing up in your household? How was money talked about, if it was talked about at all? Was it a source of stress or tension, or was it associated with security or abundance?

Do you feel like you learned anything explicitly, or are you still carrying lessons from that time without realizing it? I also hear people often say, I am doing the opposite of what I grew up seeing happen with money in my household.

I often use a simple example that has nothing to do with money to illustrate this point. When I was a kid, my mother told me never to put knives in the dishwasher. I never really understood why. I just followed the rule, and I still do it to this day. I think it has something to do with the knives getting dull, but I am not even totally sure. I just follow the rule.

That is a pretty benign example, but now think about how we might do something similar with money. Are there little rules or stories you carry around about how you should spend, save, or avoid money altogether? Things you do automatically without ever questioning where they came from. These are stories that tend to run on autopilot in our minds.

And whether we like it or not, we all have money histories. They show up as oversaving and not spending, which can limit our lives, or overspending and not saving, which can put us in a precarious situation. They show up as being judgmental about how we use money or how other people use money. They show up as avoidance, guilt, shame, and anxiety about how much we have, how much we do not have, or what we think we should or should not be doing with it.

So I want to leave you with a couple of questions that I hope might help unlock some of this for you.

First, what is a money decision you have made recently that brought you a lot of joy? And joy does not have to mean making more money. It can mean making a decision that felt aligned with your values and supportive of the life you want to live.

Now the flip side. What is a money decision you look back on recently and think, that was not such a wise choice for me? Why did you make it? Was it driven by fear, pressure, a need to conform, or an old narrative you have never stopped to question?

I think questions like these open the door to much bigger and deeper conversations about our own money histories, which can be really important when it comes to getting to a new place with money and feeling better about it in our lives.

One simple example people often mention when we talk about money histories is their earliest memory of money. The tooth fairy comes up a lot. For many of us, this was our first real experience with money. If the tooth fairy visited your house, what did you do with that money? Did you save it? Did you spend it? Did you get a lesson about it?

The tooth fairy is very present in our household right now. My son, who is six, is about to lose a tooth, and he is starting to learn about money. I find myself thinking about how to help him develop a healthy, balanced relationship with it.

Recently, he received twenty five dollars as a Christmas gift. We started small. We talked about what it means to have twenty five dollars, what happens if you spend some of it or all of it, what choices that opens up at the toy store, and what choices it does not.

When I look at him, I see someone who is starting with a blank slate around money. Then I think about myself, or other adults, and realize we are not starting from blank slates at all. These old emotional stories, patterns, and reactions show up very quickly.

Understanding the what and the why can be helpful. But the bigger question is whether the patterns we have learned over time are helping or inhibiting the way we use money in our lives today. To me, that is the most important question in all of this.

I am not a therapist, even though I am married to one. But I do believe that simply raising these questions can unlock real awareness. Awareness that leads to more values based decisions, decisions that feel grounded and aligned with what actually matters to you.

And when I say good decisions, I am not talking strictly about making or losing money. I am talking about decisions that feel consistent with the life you want to live.

So I want to invite you to create a little space to think about how money shows up in your life. Not just how much you have, how much you need, or what you want to do with it, but how you actually think and feel about it. That is where the real value is, and there may be a real unlock there for you.

I am including some questions in the show notes to help you reflect on this. I hope you will check them out, and we will see you next time.

Episode Notes:

Some Money History Questions for Further Reflection: 

These questions were sourced from Financial Planning the Next Step by Roy Diliberto and Financial Planning 3.0 by Richard Wagner.

Some Questions to Start:

1. Family and Money: what was it like growing up in your family and money? 
2. Were your parents similar or different in their attitudes toward money?
3. Was money generally talked about? Or not?
4. What messages did you receive from your family about money?
5. Do you still carry any of those with you today?
6. What’s your worst experience with money? What’s your most joyful?
7. Do you generally think of money positively or negatively? Why?
8. What’s the best financial decision you’ve ever made? 
9. What does it mean to be financially independent?

Some Questions for Deeper Exploration: 

1. Did your family come to this country on any motive related to money?
2. What’s your cultural heritage and how has it been affected by money?
3. Do you know anything else about your family’s money history?
4. How was the subject of money addressed by any religious traditions you grew up around?
5. How did you relate to money as a child? Did you feel rich or poor?
6. As you grew up, did the way you relate to money change?
7. Have your attitudes toward money shifted in your adult life?
8. Will you inherit money? How does that make you feel?
9. Do you judge others by how you perceive they deal with their money?
10. If a friend asked for money, would you lend it to them? How would you feel if they did something with the money you didn’t approve of?
11. Do you feel guilty about having money (or prosperity)?