Money Mindset Matters

As much as I’d like to say that I’ve got all this wellness stuff figured out, I just can’t. Especially the financial parts of that wellness web. Money is something I’ve struggled with my entire life; the power of it, how to get more of it, what to do with it once I have it, and now, how to improve my attitude about it.

Considering that I was born into poverty, raised in poverty, and lived in poverty until just a few short years ago, my relationship with money has been pretty unhealthy. There’s always been a scarcity mindset, as in, “how am I going to be able to afford the basics” was more common a thought than “how can I make more money”. Life was always trying to just scrape by rather than improve my situation because my hope was gone.

That, by the way, is the difference between mindset and negative thoughts. When the negative thoughts take over and are the norm rather than occasional blips that all humans have, then we know that we our minds are set = mindset. This is completely reversible, by the way. Today I’m talking about just this; how to begin the process of reversing our negative mindset about money.

Did you know that until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974 women were not allowed to even get a credit card without their husband’s permission? Or that in 1988 women were finally allowed to sign for a business loan without a male relative co-signer? The fact that there are so many women entrepreneurs now should be giving all women hope that they can do hard things too.

So many of the widows that I used to work with really struggled with learning how to manage their finances, the opportunities available to them, and wrapping their heads around the mere fact that they were now in charge of their finances. Even my ex-mother-in-law was raised to believe that women didn’t have a right to know about the household finances; that her husband was there to provide and take care of all that. My generation came in at the very beginning of women holding power with their own money, so some of the old traditional ways were still very present while I was growing up. Money was something to be feared.

So, what are are some things that women in particular can do to help manage their mindset around money? Jen Sincero, author of You Are a Badass At Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth says “When it comes to having sex and making money, you’re supposed to know what you’re doing and be all great at it, but nobody teaches you anything about it,” and she couldn’t be more dead on.

Did you ever have classes in school that taught you how to manage a household budget, apply for business loans, use credit responsibly, or hell, even find the best deals on the healthiest foods? Or how about a class that taught you about the value of your health and how to be a responsible health care consumer? Or anything about real estate and what does escrow even mean? Or how to use money as a tool, rather than a measurement of success?

No, me neither.

My children have had brief introductions to personal finance, like learning how to balance their account, track their spending with a debit card, etc., but with emphasis on the word brief. So, that leaves it to us parents to teach these things, which is pretty cool in that it requires us to learn what our attitudes are about money and then decide if that’s what we want to pass on to our children.

For me, I wanted my children to learn that money is not the root of all evil. This saying places responsibility on an inanimate object. The person who uses that money is where the responsibility lies - and even then I’d argue the list of truly evil acts that involve money is small.

We hold the power, but our relationship with money is where we must start the adjustments. If we grew up in a household that struggled financially, with parents who had a negative mindset about money, or even had to worry about whether the electricity would be on when we got home from school, this can set us up for money relationship struggles ourselves. Most likely, we were fostered into a scarcity mindset, which is often fueled by fear.

For folks who have never had to worry about these things, it can feel like “the others” can’t understand the fear of wondering if all those groceries we just brought home are going to be okay sitting in a cooler for a week until we can get enough money to pay the electric bill. From the outside it can look like irresponsible financial behaviors, I’m sure. And there may even be some truth to that. But for those of us who have had that struggle, we may have made that choice because it seemed like the only way to survive in that moment. (I’ve definitely made choices exactly like that one, and I’m here to tell you that the gallon of milk will stay cold if you only open the cooler as needed, but the electric company won’t work with you on a payment plan after shut-off. So, make the super uncomfortable call, get on a payment plan, and avoid that scenario at all costs.)

Our perception of the power that money holds is ultimately the thing that forms our attitude toward it. If we perceive it as something that is difficult to manage, acquire, or associate it with people who hold power over us, then it is easy to see why we’d have a negative mindset surrounding money. If we choose to look at it as a tool to acquire the things that make our lives easier, more comfortable, and keep our basic human needs met, then we eliminate some of those ill feelings and we can then begin to make a plan. For instance, if we were to change our views about food from “good” or “bad” to more of an overall puzzle in which we just need to find the pieces that fit best for us, a lot of us would struggle less with the thought of cleaning up our diet to meet our goals.

The same thing applies to money. Instead of viewing it as “good” or “bad”, we can choose to look at money as a piece of the puzzle we call life.

What are our basic human needs?

Shelter, food and water, love.

Though not necessary, money sure can make shelter easier to acquire, and it definitely can serve as a tool to make that shelter more comfortable. We then can start adding things in like plumbing, running water, electricity, heat and/or cooling tools, etc. If we get really lucky, we can start to add things in like carpeting, walls to separate rooms for eliminating waste and cooking, or even sleeping quarters. Suddenly things like a refrigerator, an oven, recess lighting, shower heads that have several settings, garbage disposals, and working smoke alarms seem like luxury items, wouldn’t you agree?

We are currently living in a rental home. We’ve been here just about three and a half years and plan to stay until we are ready to purchase our own home. There is nothing awesome about this house other than it’s big enough for our family to live here and not be on top of each other. There are things we bitch about every day; the cheap fixes to big problems that we have no control over, fixtures we’d love to swap out, painting and general remodeling we dream about. However, we also know that we are incredibly fortunate to have a place that meets all of our basic needs and then some.

It would be very easy for us to stay caught up in the “we hate this place and can’t wait to get out of here” mentality. I know this because we do feel this way often. We have committed to going back to the acceptance and gratitude mindset, however, because we understand that no matter how much we don’t have right now, we have so much more than others. We are now able to offer our children a home that we both dreamed of when we were children, and we know that with hard work, commitment, and firm goals, we’ll accomplish our dreams when we are meant to.

I will also fully admit that not until the last few years was I able to find my way out of the scarcity-fear-always-wanting-more mindset. I’d find myself feeling envious of others who seemingly had it all. Nice homes, nice cars, nice clothes, disposable income even. They all seemed so far out of reach for me…I’d never get there. I was destined for a life of poverty. Who was I to think that I even deserved more? I made my choices; dropping out of school, becoming a young single mom. Life was not going to be kind to me.

Someone who I was very close to was awful with her money. We had the “floating $20” that we’d lend each other back and forth, never keeping track of who had borrowed it last. We just knew that when the other messed up and needed a little extra, we’d float them cash until they got paid, and vice versa. Eventually she started to clean up her budget a little, finding ways to make extra money. She repaired her credit enough to get a small limit on a credit card and built up her credit enough to be able to buy a car on her own, and so on.

As I watched her start to acquire nicer things while I kept struggling, I found myself feeling incredibly envious. Sometimes even wondering what I had done to not deserve the nice life that she seemed to have. One day I even found the courage to ask her, “what did you do to get out of the cycle?” Her answer was simple and yet didn’t make sense to me at the time. She said, “I made the choice to clean up my choices.” She chose to throw $20 at her debt rather than blowing it on scratch off tickets.

Now, that says everything to me. Instead of having the “I hope I win” mentality, she made the choice to make her money win immediately. By paying down her debt rather than throwing her hands in the air and hoping for a miracle, she was making the choice to clean up her choices. Little by little she paid off her debt enough to be able to live the life she wanted.

It still took me a few years after that conversation to truly understand the impact that mindset around money could have. Until I was able to determine one of my most valuable core beliefs - that the Universe will always provide exactly what we need, when we need it, even if we don’t understand it - I was going to be stuck in the scarcity mindset. I had to allow myself to have faith in the Universe, and even more importantly, in myself. I had to learn to trust myself to make choices that would allow me to leave the fear-based choices behind and start making choices that would allow me to grow and evolve beyond what I had known all those years.

Was it scary? TERRIFYING.

But the more I learned to have faith in myself, my intuition, my gut, whatever you want to call it, the more the Universe showed up in ways that most times didn’t make sense until later. Trusting myself to intuitively know that if I paid this XYZ bill on time (for once), I would be able to figure out how to pay the rest of them too became easier. Relying on my ability to give my children a better childhood than I had allowed me to make choices that not only benefitted them, but myself. One of my biggest expenses were cigarettes. Looking back at how much I spent on those and how little I had only reaffirms the notion that we prioritize what we want most. During those years, I wanted to smoke. Once I made up my mind that I wanted other things more, like the ability to breathe, taste food, and have a little money, cigarettes became less of a priority.

You see, I had been wearing those ruby red slippers all along!

The power to shift your mindset is within you. If you find yourself in a constant state of struggle financially, I urge you to tune into this week’s podcast episodes. Tuesday’s will be me talking about the connection between financial mindset and nutrition/weight loss, and Thursday’s guest is a financial expert who specializes in working with women. These are going to be powerful episodes for anyone who struggles with their mindset around money!

//://://://