Developing a healthy money relationship is essential for financial success. Cultural and personal limitations can hinder your chances of developing one and, hence, make your relationship with money miserable. Money is a tool. As with any tool, the way you use it and the thought of it can deeply change your outcomes. This post touches on five of the most common limitations imposed on our relationship with money.
Why is a Healthy Money Relationship Important?
It sounds like a trivial question, but it is relevant for each one of us to determine what value we give money. Understanding our relationship with money will give us the chance to develop a healthy money relationship with more clarity. For many of us, money is just something inevitable. Lack of money can become daunting, and abudance of it can scare the owner, who may misanage it.
Developing a healthy money relationship gives you the chance to pursue your financial goals with clarity. It allows you to manage your current and perspective financial situation with ease and consciousness.
Whatever your ideas about it, money covers an essential role in our lives. Hence, it is better to go in with full understanding of your stance and the tools to change what doesn’t serve you.
Here we address five pillars to consider to understand your relationship with money and to develop a healthy one.
Money Guilt
Money Status
Manage the potential guilt-loaded feelings you may have. Our society is weirdly shaped in many regards, but its relationship with money is utterly strange. While being extremely money-based, it has built a set of feelings of guilt around wealth.
Somehow, being rich or wealthy is a bad thing, regardless of how you use or how you made your money. On the other hand, having too little money is also not a good thing: it leaves the person ranked lower in the absolutely senseless society scale we built up in our minds. Make no mistake, though: if people put in the effort to improve their money situation, and work hard to make money, they are often accused of being greedy.
This shows that no matter what you do and what your financial status is, people will find a way to judge you and make you feel guilty. This should help you escape the idea that guilt around money is somewhat justifed. It isn’t. Your money status has nothing to do with the value you have as a person, and that should be always clear in your mind.
Money Spending
Money spending is also surrounded by heavy judgment. Especially on social media, people are not free to spend the money they earned, even though their buying habits feed the families of workers involved in the industries that serve the spender. They will be judged and attacked, most of the time, for the money they spend.
Charity does not escape the guilt-loaded judgment: if people disclose their involvement with charities, they are often accused of showing off and using the charity for a personal agenda. If they do not disclose it, they are accused of not giving back.
Can You Win?
It seems that for society a person cannot really win when it comes to being judged for money. This is an important thing to understand since it may free you from part of that guilt you may have built inside. Money is a tool: as with every tool, it is better to have it than to need it.
How you choose to behave while being in any financial status only depends on the person you choose to be. Money abundance and lack of mney don’t change who you are. You change who you are.
Can Money Buy Happiness?
The short answer is: “YES, PARTLY”. Not a very popular answer, but I will explain why. Understanding this very simple concept may save you a lot of time, pushing you towards developing a healthy money relationship from which to benefit.
Money cannot change the things that we cannot control in life, hence it will not have any effect on the consequences of those happenings in our lives. That is a given. Can it buy complete happiness? No. Can it buy bits of happiness, things whose lack would generate stress and discomfort? Yes.
There are plenty of things that can make us happy or unhappy in life that we can control. That is where money comes into place.
It is important to note that lacking money does not mean that a person cannot be happy. Absolutely not. Having money will make things easier, though, and that is undeniable, even for the most frugal person on earth.
Money and Bits of Serenity
Money can buy you education, better housing, better healthcare, better chances. All relevant things that can shape our lives. It can buy us more time with the people we love, sometimes it can even buy us the freedom to choose what we want to subject ourselves to.
In short, money buys you a piece of serenity. They are extremely precious things and can be the building blocks of a wholesome happiness. Is money the only source of serenity? No. You can be happy and serene even without money. You can find other tools to build upon yourself and your life and be happy. That said, having money will help those who choose to pursue a certain financial status.
Be Grateful to Your Money
Whatever your money situation is, try to love your money. Not in the sense of being obsessed with money and putting it above everything else. Just be grateful for what your mind is doing for you. It has nothing to do with greed or being materialistic. Any money you have right now is doing the best it can for you and your life, at any given moment, provided that you use it with that goal in mind. Being grateful to the money you have is a good practice.
I know first-hand it is not easy to love what your money is doing for you when you do not have enough of it. However, things in life are not static. We can change our money situation if we do not feel comfortable in it. At least we can try, and put the factors to success we have to good use. Having a good relationship with money, not seeing it as an enemy, but as a positive tool, can help in that. Get rid of guilt and possibly fear, even though I know not having money can be scary. Try, however, to understand what paths you must build or change so to reach your goals, instead of fearing money itself.
Money and Mental Health
Money problems can have a big impact on mental health. I believe that even those who claim that money doesn’t buy you happiness cannot claim that lack of money does. Lack of money can be scary, to the point of setting a person’s brain on a path towards mental discomfort at best, especially when the money issues are prolonged in time. The mind can respond in different ways. For some, it sets a pattern of obsessive thinking that may further disrupt the money relationship they have. An obsessive relationship is never profitable.
Even when money is not a contributor to a person’s mental health issues, it can buy a way out of that state. Good therapists usually cost good money, so do life coaches. Does it mean that a person with mental health issue and no money can never get better and achieve a better life? Absolutely not. Plenty of people have embarked in personal successful journeys out of their depression and trauma. Money makes the access to different resources easier, that is all.
The Money Expert
Become the expert of your own money. Without building an obsession for it, having full comprehension of money needs and habits is a great asset in our development portfolio. Knowledge of spending and saving habits, as well as earning habits, can guide us on our money journey. It is never too early to start, but it is important to realize that it is also never too late. The internet often seems focused on only guiding young people towards accumulating wealth, but it is never too late to change your position in life. Financial and otherwise. Chances may be different, so may be the tools needed to reach your goals. However, you are the one in power when it comes to your own money journey.
Takeaway Message
A lot of thought constructs built around money may be hindering your development of a healthy money relationship. Treating money as a tool that can, indeed, make our lives easier is important. While it is important to understand that money can serve us in positive ways, it is also essential not to develop a resigned attitude towards it when we are in a position of lacking money. It does not matter the age or the conditions in which you currently find yourself: things can change, you can make them change. Obviously, there are environments and conditions that make everything easier, and not everybody experiences those. It would be silly to pretend we all start at the same place and we all have the same obstacles. We do not. However, we all can make a difference in our own money journey, and we all have the chance to succeed in getting out of a situation we do not like.
