Money Mindset

Growing up we didn't have much. Money I mean. My mum wove bandages by night in a factory and my dad worked at a scrap yard. We lived in a terrace house with a flagstone yard in't'NORTH. Where, have you not ventured, it has a reputation for being rather grim.

That said, I wasn't very aware of what I didn't have. Pre social media and MTV generation, all I knew what that I was the same as everyone around me.

My besties lived down the road in a house just like ours.

They ate food just like us (banana sandwiches and spaghetti hoops on toast) and on a Friday, my mum and their's pooled their resources so we could eat. Creating whatever they could out of the contents of their rather bare fridges and cupboards together.

They did extra-curricular activities just like us (that is to say, free ones like playing out) and watched the same TV shows as us: City of Gold; Ulysses; Jim'll Fix it.

Despite my working class roots, I never wanted for anything. Except on occasion 'shop bought' stuff from Tammy Girl rather than the clothes my mum made me. I know, I had it entirely backwards. I was about 5 at this point though so cut me some slack.

We also managed to go to the states to visit relatives when I was a toddler and I never felt like Santa let me down, so we were never poor.

Not like my mum had been as a kid anyway - as she told us, often. She was of the coal-in-your stocking generation and regular visits from the bailiffs who invariably left empty handed as they had nothing of value to take at her house. Her stories made me aware, even from a very young age, that I had A LOT more than many.

Her tales and my lived experience combined to give me a vague awareness of the fact that money could make your life nicer and easier and the lack of it, well, that could render it a bit shit. My frame of reference had me firmly in the former, rather than the latter, category and I loved my childhood. I felt safe and comfortable. I was happy for things to stay exactly how they were. But things, of course, never do.

When I was 7 we moved from North Manchester to the infinitely posher Cheshire; where I marvelled at all the Cheshireish accents and took a fair bit of stick for my Lancashire lilt.

Our new house was massive to my Oldham eyes. A detached home with a garden of actual grass. Though my opinion of it was that it was entirely crapper than the last one because my besties were not 5 doors down.

We could afford to do more things at this point too - we holidayed abroad each year to places with swimming pools and I did ballet and flute lessons and the like. I began to have my eyes opened to a world a little bit fancier than the one I'd known before.

My dad was working as a marketing executive and mum, having attempted the SAHM thing and found it too boring to continue with, was back in a mill doing piece* work making all sorts of things from pirate hats to oven gloves.

*for many years I thought she did 'peace work' and was actually some kind of diplomat, so to say what my parents did career-wise and where we as a family sat in the hierarchy of 'wealth and influence' in life was still very very cloudy.

Over the years there in Cheshire though, things very obviously began to change and from their humble roots my parents became quite affluent. My mum using her work ethic, phenomenal style and seamstress skills to set up a successful interior design business once the mill closed down. My dad, having the ability to learn fast and get on with anyone and everyone wound up being the director of an advertising company creating exhibitions for pharmaceutical companies. Though a salaried-director and not a share holder I remember being told. We might have moved into 'their' middle class world, but we were still working class 'us' at heart. Because working class people are better. Clued in. Aware. Not wankers.

It's more complex that it presents I tell you, the old British Class System.

By the time I left home to go to Uni, I had learnt that we were 'OK' for money. And for us, money brought experiences. We travelled to Korea and Spain. We went camping and bike riding. We joined clubs and learnt skills. Money I grew to think of, was a vehicle for doing stuff, rather than having stuff. An energy of sorts that flowed in and out and let you explore.

For many years, my view of money as energy-in-flow served me well. I knew I'd be OK. That money would come and it'd be fine and I could do cool stuff with it. In part, this was probably borne of the fact I had always worked myself, and so for the most part, I had money coming in of my own, which was basically to do with as I pleased given I lived and ate at home still.

And I do mean it when I say always. My first job being when I was just 3 picking strawberries in Scotland for 20p a bucket, and from there I juggled up to three jobs simultaneously alongside school and uni. That I was always earning and had no actual expenses allowed me to think much less than I might have otherwise about money as I grew up.

Now however, it has become one of the things that occupies a huge chunk of my brain space and informs almost all of my decisions.

While what I believed most of my life and served me well enough into my early 30s as a DINK with a contract mindset, a love of travel, and nothing beyond a year long forward view, it hasn't really held true so much of late. It isn't flowing both ways quite as it was (hello SAHM and Student life there) and while I know it'll always be OK, it's still a bit freak-out-y at times these days (hello inflation). Add to that I am unable to explore in the way I was previously, which served to recalibrate my sanity and remind me of what's really important (hello parenthood, COVID and school terms, and goodbye constant travel) and I came to the understanding that money and my relationship with it might need to be something I looked into a little more closely.

In order to take a good hard look at my Money Mindset, I started working through books like Sarah Akwisombe's The Money Is Coming and Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money and came to realise that while I DO still have this underlying feeling that I'll always be OK, and money will flow to me, I have never felt like I'd have a lot of it.

That I'd be able to have the experiences AND THE THINGS. To travel around Thailand for three weeks AND to have a YSL bag accompany me.

I have always felt like there's enough... but only just enough. Never that I would, could, or perhaps deserved, to live in abundance.

Exploring my money mindset also showed me that I have intense reactions to others being gifted or given money I don't think they deserve/have 'earned'. Which suggests that a) I am somewhat of a judgemental busybody, and b) that I have somehow internalised in my beliefs that money is hard to come by and has to be worked for. That it doesn't just come with ease to you.

I know that these are things I need to work on.

The latter in order to get rich(er); the first in order to be happy(er). Or at least to be less frustrated and invested with situations that are beyond my control and are none of my business.

So amongst other things, this year, I'll be working on all things financial.

The idea that it is easy to make money and that I can be (and deserve to be) affluent is probably the easier of the two to start with.

Mostly it's about my own mindset and self-value. Of being aware of any talk of scarcity and stopping it in its tracks. Both I have already begun to address. You will not hear me ever say I 'cannot' afford something. I'm saving for it or working on it, or truthfully, I just don't value it enough to pay for it.

Mid last year I found I was buying into the general feeling of societal anxiety about how everything was getting expensive and that no one had any (enough) money. How everyone was feeing the pinch. How many were priced out of the housing market. How much help from food banks and charities was being sought in our current cost of living crisis. This outlook created a sense of low level panic about my own finances. I was talking about how expensive things were and how hard things were too. Because they were. They are. And yet...

I made myself stop.

I made myself look at all the people sailing yachts and buying Louis Vuitton bags that I saw in my Insta feed. Closer to home (and by which I mean, my own socio-economic sphere, which isn't Jimmy Choo's and weekends at The Callile for the most part) I saw those houses still selling and those people still moving into bigger and better ones. Those kids still in private schools. Those new cars. And while I might have to accept that it was true that things were more costly and I was feeling the pinch, it wasn't true that no-one had any money. Clearly, some people were absolutely fine and many were quite wealthy out there.

Knowing what I speak becomes my truth, I might now empathise and say something like 'its a bit like that after Christmas' if people comment on their stretched situation. Or nod in understanding when someone tells me they can't make a night out now budget-wise. But I will not say that I cannot afford the things I value anymore. I will not put them entirely out of reach. Even if they feel a bit too far to get fingers on right now.

I am always choosing somewhere else to put that money after all - somewhere I value more in my current situation. Like that bill that will get me 8% interest if I don't pay it. Because I do have money. And if I know you and you're reading this, you probably do too. We are not the ones living in tents after losing our homes or surviving on two minute noodles because they're dead cheap.

Though even if we were, we still live in a country with free healthcare and education and help from many places. We live in peace and we are safe. And really, if that isn't wealth I don't know what is.

Plus, you know what else? I see, often, people with (apparently) no money buy cigarettes or alcohol. Go out for lunch and spend $30 on a sandwich and coffee they could have made at home for about $5. So money is out there. Start trusting its coming your way and stop fearing it leaving and you're halfway to abundance...

Or as my husband and his scientific mind would say, you're in debt and delusional. But I think our money-power is based on something well beyond time, skills, and work ethic.

Not least because I grew up in the UK with a historically rigid class system where the rich passed down their fortunes to offspring who never needed to lift a finger and the poor stayed poor; exhausted out of rebellion by labour, and societal and religious indoctrination. The overhang of which ensured the maxim 'work hard get rich' was never something that really rang true with me. I always felt like there was way more to it.

There's a mystique and a lure and an undefinable quality to money that makes it a little illogical. Like it's also to do with luck or how the stars align as much as anything else, whether you have it or not. I know a lot of people who work bloody hard for very little. Is it timely to mention my own husband gets $43 an hour for (literally) saving lives here? Around the same amount I get for playing Snakes and Ladders or Twister with a client. Just as I know others who earn a fortune from one idea they had a few decades ago. Our pay, absolutely does not necessarily reflect our efforts.

This injustice leads me into the second of my major financial issues to overcome: The irrational irritation I have of seeing it be gifted willy-nilly to those who haven't either laboured for it, or who have not been born with the silver spoon in their mouths I'm so familiar with as an ex-pat.

Now while I don't necessarily condone or respect the latter - what I guess we still call 'The Upper Classes' - I do understand them. It's basically, in my mind, like an old school lottery win.

What I struggle with is this brand new generation of takers I see, By which I mean those who get to send their kids to private school or drive Land Rover's because the generation above them worked their asses off, or worked out how to 'do money' to get a bit more than enough. If they've become the equivalent of Alan Sugar, then I just happily pop them in the 'Upper Classes' category and leave them to their millions...

BUT if they're just comfortable, yet sharing it to their own detriment and delaying their retirement or forgoing the overseas trips they might have otherwise taken were they not putting several grandkids through posh school and paying the lease on that Land Rover for their 47 year old son... I can't cope.

Sure, I should probably see it as generous and admirable. As loving and kind. But I really struggle to.

I see it as weird and ick.

And while I have been lucky enough to be gifted money in the past: mum charged me rent for 2 years then gave it back to me when I moved out - in a kind of forced saving scheme; my brother and I were given a share of some money our parents came into about a decade ago; and in the spirit of equity, as a kid I got a lump of cash when I didn't get a motorbike like him, it has never really sat well with me to get money that I saw as 'free'.

So much so, that at age 18, when I went to buy my flights to Calgary in Canada to see the Stampede, which I'd been saving for since my paper round age 12, I had to refuse the 1000 pounds dad tried to give me for it. Because that was HIS money and I had my own. And had I not, well, I couldn't have gone.

It's a strange tangle of integrity and pride and luck (because I have had well paid jobs alongside the terribly paid ones). And that I have the capacity and the health and the education and the opportunity and the freedom to earn more that has made me this way. But is that all? As I explore my attitude to money and my beliefs around it, I have to wonder.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung first developed the concept of a “shadow self” to describe the things people repress or do not like to acknowledge. Our hidden side. The thing we do not love, respect, like, hell, even accept sometimes, about who we are. The traits, beliefs and feelings we dare not present to others. Because of so many reasons. The shame, the potential backlash, the fact they paint us in a way we do not want to be painted.

I know that it makes me seem petty and ungrateful to care that others are given more than I am. Just as I know I do not really want or need it to be given. The two paradoxically inhabiting the same brain space.

The pettiness is especially confrontational when I see it happen close around me because that really gets my goat. Even though I know that if I asked, what I see would be given as freely and unquestioningly to me too.

But I would never ask.

And so, is a part of the issue my own inability to speak up and have these money conversations?

Perhaps. But then, what would I say? I do not want or need this and yet it pisses me off a treat you give it to others? It's not my call to make. And maybe (despite appearances) they DO NEED it.

Back when I didn't know anything of it, it impacted my life precisely 'not at all'. The thing is, now that I do know and because it's close to home and not super abstract or theoretical - it's waaaay harder to deal with. It not just weird and ick. It's fucking bollocks as well.

Enter here some self-work...

I sat with whether it was that I felt 'poor' being a SAHM with a student husband and zero income for 4.5 years that I cared too much about money business that was not my own.

Whether the gap that created in our financial progress and the current expenses of living, and now with kids to provide for who bump up the costs of the one thing I value most in the world (travel and experiences) by a significant fucking margin was what made me sit up, take notice and get my nosey parker on.

Was it perhaps the feeling of never being able to get ahead just now that's underlying my reaction? As soon as it comes in, it's already spent. Mostly on things I don't much want.

On braces and solar panels and bills of over $1000 a pop.

Perhaps it is the injustice of it, and the fact that the person who I think should actually be most bothered by the inequity I see gives about as many fucks as they do who wins Love Island that's given me the hump about it. Hell, am I essentially a 44 year old teenager expecting things to be fair and then feeling peeved when they are not, and annoyed no one is lamenting this fact with me?

While I don't claim to have all (any) of the answers yet, I did begin to realise that, despite how much I LOVE my children and want nothing but ease and abundance for them, I would probably not give them that at my own expense.

Hello shadow self. My but what a prick you are.

I didn't like what the metaphorical mirror reflected there, so I dug a little deeper.

Not only was I a tad fed up with feeling poor these days, I wasn't willing to let my offspring get by without knowing, really knowing, the value of what they had. And to do that, they had to know how to work for it. Maybe save for it. Learn how to prioritize and choose.

To understand in having to evaluate things, that while they might not have all the options, they had many of them. And the ones that they felt they didn't? Well, for them, they'd be just on the other side of some hard work and focus.

Because if we are healthy and free, we can create whatever we want to. I realised I have a need for my kids to know first-hand the value in that potential. Because that way of living makes people that I respect. People who devise, develop and design their own worlds.

Similarly, somewhere in that process itself, I believe that REAL gratitude lies, and real values are unearthed. I discovered, I guess, that I will go as far as to make them know how to fight for things, and to earn things in my refusal to simply give. Whether that is through mind work or hard work or a combination of the two.

Beyond that, at times, to not earn those things. To fail and fall short. And to learn through that too. To get uncomfortable and frustrated and go without. Then, ideally, to step the fuck up if they still have that unfulfilled desire and get it/that/there for themselves.

In that process they can not only achieve their goals, but find the glory and the appreciation of those goals, and of themselves.

Money might well be a little magic and a little labour. But we can all be both a magician and a labourer if we so choose to be.